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Have you used their product? It’s a gd joy to use. In casual use, I haven’t run into any bugs at all. It took me all of about ten minutes to get set up, it just

Have you used their product? It’s a gd joy to use. In casual use, I haven’t run into any bugs at all. It took me all of about ten minutes to get set up, it just works, and I didn’t have to think too hard about it. What’s their secret? A great product that people want to talk about.

Shank 4y ago
> In casual use, I haven’t run into any bugs at all. It took me all of about ten minutes to get set up, it just works, and I didn’t have to think too hard about it. The one issue I have with Tailscale is that the on-demand/automatically activating VPN functions on iOS don't work correctly [0] [1]. Everything else about it, including the business model, makes me overjoyed. It's a great product. [0]: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3771 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3771 [1]: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5030 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5030
- cweagans 4y ago
  I haven’t run into that one. I mostly use Tailscale for my home network, so I connect when I need access to something at home. I imagine they’ll figure that out though. Seems relatively straightforward to reproduce/debug.
- aidos 4y ago
  Last time I posted on an HN thread about Tailscale someone else mentioned Tailscale mobile battery use issues on android. I’m currently travelling and am staying in an area with terrible internet. Can now confirm that, in that situation, Tailscale battery use gets totally out of hand. In my case I only really had it on out of habit, so it’s easy to just not run it on my phone for the time being. Caveat to say; I still love everything about Tailscale. I’ve switched to using Tailscale ssh for work and it’s an absolute joy.
t-3 4y ago
What does it offer over plain wireguard? WG is just so simple and easy to set up that I don't see the point at all.
- xena 4y ago
  Tailscale employee here. Imagine wireguard being even less effort to set up. Imagine no more firewall rules required. Imagine it being so easy it takes 5 minutes to put 2 devices on your network. That's what tailscale brings at its core. Then we can talk about things like ACLs, SSH, Tailauth, and more built on top of it.
  - jsmith45 4y ago
    There is also the automatic NAT traversal. Sure for devices on a home network, one can often set up port forwarding (or be lucky enough to have working ipv6). Corporate networks though often have NAT that regular employees cannot reconfigure, and probably don’t want to set up port forwarding to your machine. Now imagine your workstation is on corp 1 network behind a NAT, and you are out at a corporate client with your laptop, behind another NAT, and need to access your workstation. With traditional wireguard, this situation would require negotiating port forwarding with one of the corps, or require using some form publically available bastion host. With tailscale these things are not even a consideration. You will be able to access your workstation by name, without having to do anything extra. Even where the corporate client has a crazy restrictive outbound firewall allowing only port 80 and port 443 to the public internet, you will be able to access your machine without having to do anything special. (In this case you would definitely be using tailscale’s Relay servers, so would have limited bandwidth, but it will still work seamlessly from your perspective. And assuming the tailnet you are using is your companies (rather than you adding you workstation to a personal tailnet), you could access not just your workstation, but any other machine that has tailscale installed connected to the same tailnet that the tailscale ACLs allow access to. So for example, the corporate documentation file share server, perhaps the reporting database server, etc. I know that Xe previously had a rather nice manual Wireguard configuration that is either completely ripped out, or is at least seldom used, because tailscale is just simpler.
    - xena 4y ago
      I ripped it out completely. My wireguard network was a "plan b" to get back into my servers, but I have another contingency plan now that I've removed manually managed WireGuard from the equation. Tailscale is just so damn convenient, it hurts lol.

Shank 4y ago

> In casual use, I haven’t run into any bugs at all. It took me all of about ten minutes to get set up, it just works, and I didn’t have to think too hard about it. The one issue I have with Tailscale is that the on-demand/automatically activating VPN functions on iOS don't work correctly [0] [1]. Everything else about it, including the business model, makes me overjoyed. It's a great product. [0]: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3771 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3771 [1]: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5030 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5030

cweagans 4y ago
I haven’t run into that one. I mostly use Tailscale for my home network, so I connect when I need access to something at home. I imagine they’ll figure that out though. Seems relatively straightforward to reproduce/debug.
aidos 4y ago
Last time I posted on an HN thread about Tailscale someone else mentioned Tailscale mobile battery use issues on android. I’m currently travelling and am staying in an area with terrible internet. Can now confirm that, in that situation, Tailscale battery use gets totally out of hand. In my case I only really had it on out of habit, so it’s easy to just not run it on my phone for the time being. Caveat to say; I still love everything about Tailscale. I’ve switched to using Tailscale ssh for work and it’s an absolute joy.

t-3 4y ago

What does it offer over plain wireguard? WG is just so simple and easy to set up that I don't see the point at all.

xena 4y ago
Tailscale employee here. Imagine wireguard being even less effort to set up. Imagine no more firewall rules required. Imagine it being so easy it takes 5 minutes to put 2 devices on your network. That's what tailscale brings at its core. Then we can talk about things like ACLs, SSH, Tailauth, and more built on top of it.
- jsmith45 4y ago
  There is also the automatic NAT traversal. Sure for devices on a home network, one can often set up port forwarding (or be lucky enough to have working ipv6). Corporate networks though often have NAT that regular employees cannot reconfigure, and probably don’t want to set up port forwarding to your machine. Now imagine your workstation is on corp 1 network behind a NAT, and you are out at a corporate client with your laptop, behind another NAT, and need to access your workstation. With traditional wireguard, this situation would require negotiating port forwarding with one of the corps, or require using some form publically available bastion host. With tailscale these things are not even a consideration. You will be able to access your workstation by name, without having to do anything extra. Even where the corporate client has a crazy restrictive outbound firewall allowing only port 80 and port 443 to the public internet, you will be able to access your machine without having to do anything special. (In this case you would definitely be using tailscale’s Relay servers, so would have limited bandwidth, but it will still work seamlessly from your perspective. And assuming the tailnet you are using is your companies (rather than you adding you workstation to a personal tailnet), you could access not just your workstation, but any other machine that has tailscale installed connected to the same tailnet that the tailscale ACLs allow access to. So for example, the corporate documentation file share server, perhaps the reporting database server, etc. I know that Xe previously had a rather nice manual Wireguard configuration that is either completely ripped out, or is at least seldom used, because tailscale is just simpler.
  - xena 4y ago
    I ripped it out completely. My wireguard network was a "plan b" to get back into my servers, but I have another contingency plan now that I've removed manually managed WireGuard from the equation. Tailscale is just so damn convenient, it hurts lol.