I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?
Is NAT traversal actually that big of a feature? The category of people that would use a tool like this already knows many ways to do it without NAT getting in the way.
A bit off topic: it’s just insane how I used to watch this guy’s http2 in Go yt video 10 years ago, and he’s still very relevant to this day!
Cheers Brad!
WireGuard doesn't do NAT traversal. That's the main thing this adds. And this also adds a CLI tool + library to do streams over WireGuard w/o installing kernel routings, requiring root, etc.
Idk? I found it pretty easy to configure by blindly following the tutorials and copy-pasting keys. The only footgun is the keepalive setting, which will screw up the tunnel if one end is behind NAT, that tripped me hard, but besides this, no issues at all.
Half of the Software offering nowadays seems to be selling vendor lock-in at no added value and then making a profit.
Sure there's always some negligible added value, and then they reinvent a whole stack for their ecosystem. In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding? It looks like negative added value to me. Someone that tells you "don't do NAT traversal, just open a port" would be highly valuable, but saying no doesn't seem to be trendy, and is certainly not an easy sell.
There's no vendor lock-in here and no payment or account required. If Tailscale as a company fails, tailcat keeps working if you run your own DERP server. It's just open source code, not a hosted service.
> In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding?
Well, ignoring the tone... kinda yeah? I mean, if port forwarding works for you, and you have public IPv4, and you have no CGNAT, and you need a connection only between 2 hosts, then port forwarding is actually a half-decent idea. However, it's not what Tailscale excels at.
It's a pattern that occurs in commercial software yes, but Open Source has its own version of building mirror ecosystems. Collaborating to bleeding edge issues on robust infrastructure is very hard, so junior engineers that want to collaborate in open source (often for reputation building) can do so in these mirror ecosystems, it's an added bonus if they believe that they are contributing to the bleeding edge instead of rebuilding an enantiomer tech stack.
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh
https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe
https://github.com/cablehead/pai-sho
https://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli
https://github.com/coder/wush
Just a combo of never getting around to it and friends talking me out of it b/c of existing alternatives such as wormhole[2].
[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works
[2] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
Recently: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/128a36cf0367c46daff2528d...
https://github.com/golang/go/commit/3c0665e551be23e62167f625...
But Tailscale keeps sucking me in with new stuff to do. :(
if that is goal then why not go 100% open source to eliminate the ts derp control as well and get full sovereignty?
like netbird, openziti, zerotier, etc.
The DERP server is already open source and tailcat can use any DERP server you run: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/main/cmd/derper#...
We just provide some default ones (https://tailcat.dev/derpmap.json) to get started if you're not bandwidth-sensitive. But you don't have to use them.
Update: I added more explicit docs about this to https://github.com/tailscale/tailcat#bring-your-own-derp-rel...
WireGuard doesn't do NAT traversal. That's the main thing this adds. And this also adds a CLI tool + library to do streams over WireGuard w/o installing kernel routings, requiring root, etc.
Idk? I found it pretty easy to configure by blindly following the tutorials and copy-pasting keys. The only footgun is the keepalive setting, which will screw up the tunnel if one end is behind NAT, that tripped me hard, but besides this, no issues at all.
Half of the Software offering nowadays seems to be selling vendor lock-in at no added value and then making a profit.
Sure there's always some negligible added value, and then they reinvent a whole stack for their ecosystem. In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding? It looks like negative added value to me. Someone that tells you "don't do NAT traversal, just open a port" would be highly valuable, but saying no doesn't seem to be trendy, and is certainly not an easy sell.
There's no vendor lock-in here and no payment or account required. If Tailscale as a company fails, tailcat keeps working if you run your own DERP server. It's just open source code, not a hosted service.
Well, ignoring the tone... kinda yeah? I mean, if port forwarding works for you, and you have public IPv4, and you have no CGNAT, and you need a connection only between 2 hosts, then port forwarding is actually a half-decent idea. However, it's not what Tailscale excels at.