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Why behind a vpn? It sounds painful to manage. What is the reason to not deploy this setup directly on internet with let's say a firewall or other security mech

Why behind a vpn? It sounds painful to manage. What is the reason to not deploy this setup directly on internet with let's say a firewall or other security mechanisms? - edit: Is it because it's not possible to have a good Minecraft gaming experience without it? I am really curious to understand why would people need that extra layer zero config vpn?

jsilence 6y ago
Also interested in this question.
- dijit 6y ago
  NAT punching. Probably. Especially now that CGNAT is becoming endemic. God I wish ipv6 had taken off. P2P has taken a huge hit because of NAT.
tonfa 6y ago
I don't think it's easy for most people to make device behind their IPv4 nat available. Also the firewall won't provide the same security, here afaik it also handle auth for you (only approved clients can connect), so you don't have to worry about how secure the auth is on the server you're exposing. (for most people doing all those things securily would likely take much longer than 10min, and unless they're very technically savy I'm not sure how much secure it would be)
- john37386 6y ago
  So the main reason is mostly NAT is difficult to configure for home user and it also sometimes break gaming experience in some weird CGNAT setup? I like the anser and thanks for the info. Anyone else have other reasons in minds why it's useful?
  - saynay 6y ago
    My ISP rotates my public IP frequently, for some reason. I have had it switch several times in a day. Dynamic DNS helps a bit, but a VPN would simplify that a lot.
theshrike79 6y ago
Because Tailscale's product is a VPN, that's why. No other reason really.
corobo 6y ago
Just a little note Tailscale isn't painful to manage - that's their base product: easy to use Wireguard. As for whether you need it for a Minecraft server.. well I wouldn't personally have questioned it, we're on a site called hacker news after all. If anything I'd love more posts like this from people who are tinkering with things. If you remove the DigitalOcean part though and add in a home PC you do then get the benefits of being able to just connect. No port forwards, no faff. If we're really really unironically asking why.. because Tailscale wants more customers, it's what companies do.
- lambda_obrien 6y ago
  > easy to use Wireguard It gets easier?! I love how easy Wireguard is, stock, so perhaps I'll try Tailscale. Also, a good reason to do this would be to play with friends easily, sometimes NAT and other things make it hard to connect to a gaming server, and also servers like Minecraft run a lot of code from inexperienced devs, so probably lots of security concerns there. Setting up a firewall to do that is a bit harder, you need to know your friends IPs and such.

jsilence 6y ago

Also interested in this question.

dijit 6y ago
NAT punching. Probably. Especially now that CGNAT is becoming endemic. God I wish ipv6 had taken off. P2P has taken a huge hit because of NAT.

tonfa 6y ago

I don't think it's easy for most people to make device behind their IPv4 nat available. Also the firewall won't provide the same security, here afaik it also handle auth for you (only approved clients can connect), so you don't have to worry about how secure the auth is on the server you're exposing. (for most people doing all those things securily would likely take much longer than 10min, and unless they're very technically savy I'm not sure how much secure it would be)

john37386 6y ago
So the main reason is mostly NAT is difficult to configure for home user and it also sometimes break gaming experience in some weird CGNAT setup? I like the anser and thanks for the info. Anyone else have other reasons in minds why it's useful?
- saynay 6y ago
  My ISP rotates my public IP frequently, for some reason. I have had it switch several times in a day. Dynamic DNS helps a bit, but a VPN would simplify that a lot.

theshrike79 6y ago

Because Tailscale's product is a VPN, that's why. No other reason really.

corobo 6y ago

Just a little note Tailscale isn't painful to manage - that's their base product: easy to use Wireguard. As for whether you need it for a Minecraft server.. well I wouldn't personally have questioned it, we're on a site called hacker news after all. If anything I'd love more posts like this from people who are tinkering with things. If you remove the DigitalOcean part though and add in a home PC you do then get the benefits of being able to just connect. No port forwards, no faff. If we're really really unironically asking why.. because Tailscale wants more customers, it's what companies do.

lambda_obrien 6y ago
> easy to use Wireguard It gets easier?! I love how easy Wireguard is, stock, so perhaps I'll try Tailscale. Also, a good reason to do this would be to play with friends easily, sometimes NAT and other things make it hard to connect to a gaming server, and also servers like Minecraft run a lot of code from inexperienced devs, so probably lots of security concerns there. Setting up a firewall to do that is a bit harder, you need to know your friends IPs and such.