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For personal stuff, it feels totally new. It's like having your own intranet. It's like being on LAN with all of your personal devices, plus any bridged into yo
by jchw 4y ago
For personal stuff, it feels totally new. It's like having your own intranet. It's like being on LAN with all of your personal devices, plus any bridged into your tailnet, at all times, anywhere on earth. You can route your internet traffic through another machine, or not (default.) It has built-in basic file transfer, and a nice little SSH bridge.
Technologically, it's based on Wireguard. Wireguard is fast; really fast, especially compared to OpenVPN. Using cutting edge cryptography and a new UDP protocol, Wireguard connections feel roughly zero-overhead (they're not, of course.) Connections are peer-to-peer and you usually will get pretty close to the fastest reasonable route between any two devices, whether you're on LAN or overseas, whether there's a strong NAT in front or not.
They've also engineered a lot of things carefully, instead of just cobbling together existing end-user tools in Rube Goldberg arrangements. (Not saying there isn't use of existing code; there totally is. But it's all very nicely integrated from what I can see.) Doing things "the hard way" can lead to more complicated software, but the way they've architected things makes the possibilities for expanding the utility of Tailscale to be nearly limitless. It's also amazingly entertaining to read about. Seriously, just read about how their web browser SSH client works:
https://tailscale.com/blog/ssh-console/ https://tailscale.com/blog/ssh-console/
- ukd1 4y agoDid you ever use Zero Tier before?
- jchw 4y agoI tried, but I couldn't get it to work at all. I don't really know what I was doing wrong, it just hung without connecting. It's been a while and I haven't tried since.
- SadTrombone 4y agoSame. Tailscale just worked out of the box on all my devices. ZeroTier had issues connecting which I didn't bother troubleshooting because Tailscale just worked.
- raro11 4y agoI have and it works just as fine for me. TailScale seems to have a better ui and more tooling (File sharing, SSH, ...). Even though those recently led to RCE[0] 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33695886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33695886
- Rebelgecko 4y agoWhen I tried Zero Tier it had trouble with bonjour/rendezvouz/mDNS zeroconf host names. Getting it up and running on a new device was also a bit more complicated than Tailscale (although maybe at the expense of needing to trust TS more than you needed to trust ZT?)