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Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets
- leetrout 4y agoThis is great. I love go links ever since knorton turned me on to them. I will give this a spin first thing in the morning.
- elromulous 4y agoIs knorton some combination of Knuth and Norton antivirus?
- echelon 4y agoMore "Go"ogle culture out in the wild. I've seen these at a few companies now. I'm a little surprised they're still called "go"-links, though I suppose the name works everywhere.
- inplubius 4y agoEspecially because Golink seems to be (at least partially) written in Go
- dilyevsky 4y agoPretty sure orignal google’s golinks predates Go the language by many years
- majormajor 4y agoHuh. This is a thing I've seen at a few companies now and never seen reference to them coming out of Google. It makes sense, but it's also completely standalone - "go to the page."
- willnorris 4y agoA couple of the startups that do go links have blog posts on the history: https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/ https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/ https://www.trot.to/blog/2020/07/09/go-links-origin-story https://www.trot.to/blog/2020/07/09/go-links-origin-story
- Thorrez 4y agoThose 2 stories kind of contradict each other. One says Benjamin Staffin invented golinks, then later another Googler built golinks in 2006. The other says Benjamin Staffin created golinks around 2009/2010.
- whatgaul 4y agoOriginal author of https://github.com/trotto/go-links https://github.com/trotto/go-links here! We spoke with Benjamin directly, so I trust his recollection.
- dilyevsky 4y agoIt was one of the most popular “mini-services” at google along side less useful things like percent/ (which shows your tenure percentile), memegen and bunch of others, maintained by like a single engineer on the side. These were (at least to me) what was so great about Google’s early engineer-driven culture. It was like the early web app age in a sense…
- vineyardmike 4y agoI implemented this for my personal use and chose “aka/“ instead of “go/“. Still short, and still pretty self explanatory, but unique.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoWow that's a cool idea to make little services accessible over your tailscale network. Kind of reminds me of tor hidden services for your own private use but wayyyyy better UI and experience.
- photoGrant 4y agodnsmasq?
- nine_k 4y agoMore like a shared bookmark service, aligned to the peculiarities of tailscale's DNS.
- asherah 4y agothis is super cute, shout-out to the tailscale team!
- sullivanmatt 4y agoThe name is going to be quickly problematic if the trademark holder for golinks.io decides to get litigious: https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/zamora-jorge-3828689/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/zamora-jorge-3828689/
- Laremere 4y agoI was going to say the terminology comes from inside Google, where afaik go links were invented. However, yeah, that's straight up a trademark. You'd need a lawyer to know whether the trademark would survive litigation, and whether the s on those trademarks makes a material difference. (OP isn't plural, those trademarks are)
- vineyardmike 4y agoHow can they defend a trademark that people used (at Google) before them?
- sullivanmatt 4y agoA trademark is not a patent, you don't need to prove you were first to have "the idea". [IANAL] It's the first to use the term in a commercial context, which Google has not.
- mcqueenjordan 4y agoIt would also be pretty ironic if so, given that the idea was basically lifted from Google internal infra.
- fbdab103 4y agoI mean, TinyURL launched in 2002.
- mcqueenjordan 4y agoPoint taken, but I think it's a different concept -- named internal short-links versus randomly generated small strings for longer links.
- nehalem 4y agoBig fan of Tailscale, yet I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to make internal services securely available over the internet (zero trust rather than castle-and-moat). On the other hand, the former might be just to expensive for smaller organisations.
- xena 4y agoStay tuned, I have plans :)
- adhdguy 4y agoZero trust doesn't mean abandoning defense-in-depth.
- Everlag 4y agonebula[0] may be interesting; you can allow list connectivity for specific groups, all burned into the cert used to join the network. It uses some NAT hole punching orchestration to accomplish connectivity between hosts without opening ports. The main painful thing I've found has been cert management. PKI, as usual, is not a solved problem. I've managed to do some fun stuff using salt + nebula on the hobby side. [0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
- kpolls 4y ago"On the other hand, the former might be just to expensive for smaller organisations." GCP's Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) comes free with the load balancer
- whalesalad 4y agocloudflared
- willnorris 4y agoI forgot to add a link to our recent announcement blog post to the project README. I've added that now, and I think it may help explain why we specifically built a service like this on top of Tailscale to take advantage of Magic DNS, automatically authenticated connections, etc. https://tailscale.com/blog/golink/ https://tailscale.com/blog/golink/
- jhoechtl 4y agoI started reading bout tailnet and still have no clue what it is
- CommitSyn 4y agoI was thinking about asking here if anyone could give a brief yet full overview of what exactly tailscale is and who/how it benefits. I've read about it, but I still don't get it.
- fragmede 4y agoAssume all your machines have Internet access, which they probably do these days. Instead of having to create firewall rules and routes and that whole mess in order to connect to a machine on "the inside" somewhere, the machine reaches out to the Internet and creates a tunnel, and you connect to the machine through that tunnel.
- mackrevinack 4y agoi use it to access my NAS/network drive when im away from home. when im at home i can access it no problem since im connected to my home network and so is the NAS. when im away its not possible to connect to it because im on a completely different network. with tailscale installed on each device makes it seem like im still on my home network even when im away.
- aaaa4444 4y ago
- mlindner 4y agoIs this a general thing? I thought it was specific to my former employer (F5). We used go/(foo) extensively and there was numerous hotlinks for all sorts of internal services as well as a pretty interesting interface to design your own. I had thought it was an internal service developed internally. It looks like our internal version was a lot better than this open source version, at least by the screenshots.
- Sebguer 4y agoIt originated at Google, but at this point most BigTech or places founded by former BigTech have their own version. There's even a SaaS version: https://www.golinks.io/ https://www.golinks.io/
- a_k_p 4y ago[dead]
- ninawalters 4y agoHey! I work for GoLinks, just wanted to thank you for the shout-out!
- darth_avocado 4y agoYeah I had this in Square and at Twitter
- saulpw 4y agoI wrote the one for F5, in 2011 I believe. I didn't know specifically about Google's at the time, but the general concept was in the air. I was inspired by the old-schoool CompuServe (or was it AOL?) "go <keyword>" command. Bill Booth worked to get f5go open-sourced a few years after that [1]. And I'm glad you appreciated f5go's additional features; my personal favorite is the "lists" feature: a single go/ link can become a list of links very easily. Very useful for gathering research on a topic into a single place. I keep wanting to setup a personal f5go server so I can share short mnemonic links that might be lists lke this. [1] https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5go https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5go
- forthorbor 4y agoTailscale has been so great at all the tools they build and release upon tailscale itself. The real magic here is magicdns which is where all the heavy lifting is being done.
- bpanon 4y agoA few weeks back, I installed Tailscale on a Friday and the following Sunday my machine (ubuntu 22.10) was hacked and running mining/tracking software and rsyslog. I only noticed because my fans were spinning harder than usual. caveat emptor
- CommitSyn 4y agoOuch. CVE-2022-41924 Severe 9.6 A vulnerability identified in the Tailscale Windows client allows a malicious website to reconfigure the Tailscale daemon `tailscaled`, which can then be used to remotely execute code. In the Tailscale Windows client, the local API was bound to a local TCP socket, and communicated with the Windows client GUI in cleartext with no Host header verification. This allowed an attacker-controlled website visited by the node to rebind DNS to an attacker-controlled DNS server, and then make local API requests in the client, including changing the coordination server to an attacker-controlled coordination server. An attacker-controlled coordination server can send malicious URL responses to the client, including pushing executables or installing an SMB share. These allow the attacker to remotely execute code on the node. All Windows clients prior to version v.1.32.3 are affected. If you are running Tailscale on Windows, upgrade to v1.32.3 or later to remediate the issue. Published November 23, 2022.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- arianvanp 4y agoOnly affected Windows though. The user is on ubuntu
- fragmede 4y agobut given what Tailscale does, lateral movement street compromising a windows host in the network seems entirely possible.
- sph 4y agoThat is pretty bad. How the heck can a page in a browser send requests to a listening socket on my machine, bound to 127.0.0.1? Also how does an attacker "rebind DNS"? What does this even mean? EDIT: more details here: https://emily.id.au/tailscale https://emily.id.au/tailscale
- joatmon-snoo 4y agoThis made me wonder what the oldest go-link (from inside Google) discoverable on the public internet is. The earliest I've found is from Nov 2009: https://github.com/google/closure-library/blame/11ed104958a29edec435498f1a39a98dbe59db66/closure/goog/editor/plugins/removeformatting.js#L643 https://github.com/google/closure-library/blame/11ed104958a2.... (The second closest I've found in another repo is in RE2 from Mar 2010, https://github.com/google/re2/blame/954656f47fe8fb505d4818da1e128417a79ea500/util/pcre.h#L520#L520 https://github.com/google/re2/blame/954656f47fe8fb505d4818da... - and yes, both of these existed prior to the listed date, but I'm going off associated timestamps.) (Fun fact: go-links are so critical to Google ops, that they're expected to be accessible in a "everything is down" scenario.)
- a_k_p 4y agoNot just Google, every prominent silicon valley company such as Twitter, Facebook, Stripe, Square even JP Morgan has an internal go/. Fascinating history of workplace search is that at Google and Stripe if you don't find any relevant document under go/, it will take you to your workplace search portal. Both Google and Stripe has built an internal document + file + people search portal called Moma and Stripe Home respectively. You can read more about Stripe Home here - https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home
- muchospandas 4y agoNitpick: Google's go/ links don't automatically point to Moma Search if no result is found.
- tschwimmer 4y agoFacebook/Meta also has one called Intern (horrendously confusing name I know) that has profiles, doc/wiki search and all the other associated data types. One nice feature of Intern is that you can link to bugs, code changes, etc in any surface just by pasting the formatted ID and it will parse the link the automatically. There's also a shared notif system which is convenient. Source: Former PM for part of Intern
- a_k_p 4y ago[dead]
- tubs 4y agoYour cookie policy is not in line with gdpr and eu cookie rules.
- dijit 4y agoha! A few months ago I tried to find a URL shortner that fit the bill, I was reading "Software Engineering at Google" and came across information regarding their internal `go/` URL. I couldn't find anything, so I threw something together with Rust (using rocket), and gave it the ability to have static and dynamic backends, the dynamic backend would allow you to submit a link very easily. a working example (with a static backend) is here: https://go.competition.company https://go.competition.company I never got access to the real go/ service from google, so I wonder what I'm missing. Heres the code: https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs
- glacials 4y agogolinks.io is a close copy.
- mustafa01ali 4y agoI've never worked at a company that uses go links so I have to ask - what problem do these solve? Every URL I visit frequently automatically shows up in auto complete suggestions in my browser.
- sullivanmatt 4y agoTyping go/wiki is faster than typing "wiki" in my search bar and hitting the down arrow 5 times for the correct autocomplete answer. I found the bigger (unexpected) value of something like this to be that when I don't know what I want, someone else is likely to have defined it already. E.g. go/401k at my employer takes me right to the wiki page about our 401k plan with a link to our provider prominently at the top. Nobody told me this existed, I simply needed info about our 401k plan and assumed someone, at some point, would have created it. Sure, I could bookmark it or something, but simply typing go/401k "just works" for me. It's also really nice for new hires who don't have some super robust autocomplete history already built up. That's the value prop.
- kasey_junk 4y agoA huge one is documentation linking. By having the indirection in one place you don’t have to swap all the various places that might be linked to something, you just switch the go link. This is especially valuable when switching cms/erp/ticket systems etc where you may not have a lot of ability to manipulate generated links.
- packetslave 4y agoOne thing I miss from fburl (Facebook's go-links) is that pretty much EVERY internal system had built-in support for creating them. A perfect example would be the Scuba and OBS observability UIs. Instead of sharing a gnarly 500-character URL in chat to point someone to a specific query, you click "generate fburl" and get a short link. More and more commercial/open-source software has built-in support for creating their own short links these days (Grafana and Kibana both do), but having it be ubiquitous -- and easy to integrate into new tools -- was really nice.
- radicality 4y ago
- soraminazuki 4y agoOne gripe I have when using my own private golinks is that browsers take me to go.com/ instead of go/ if I don't prefix it with https:// https://. So I end up having to type 8 additional characters.
- tracker1 4y agoIf you have the domain in your dns suffix list for resolution (ie: foo.bar.net), you can just type `go/` in the browser... and it should resolve go.foo.bar.net.
- radicality 4y agoOn chrome at least, you can go setup custom search engines, so for example instead of ‘go/‘, you would type ‘go<TAB>query’, and then you can configure that to open whichever fully qualifies uri you want.