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Tailscale raises $100M

(tailscale.com)
854 points gmemstr | 9 comments | 04 May 22 13:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 14:29 UTC] No.31260955[source]▶
Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work.

The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure. Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core… I’m sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best.

I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

Web3 happens when people can host stuff on their phones, and Tailscale is something that lets you host things on your phone.

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siavosh ◴[04 May 22 14:41 UTC] No.31261130[source]▶
I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?
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gzer0 ◴[04 May 22 14:50 UTC] No.31261258[source]▶
I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network.

This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

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1. karlshea ◴[04 May 22 15:07 UTC] No.31261546[source]▶
I can do that without Tailscale though by just using the WireGuard app. What is Tailscale adding to this?
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2. nickysielicki ◴[04 May 22 15:08 UTC] No.31261559[source]▶
NAT breaking, I can have a wireguard network with Tailscale where every device only has an RFC1918 address and a default route.
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3. karlshea ◴[04 May 22 15:19 UTC] No.31261726[source]▶
Ahhh that is slick
4. rrix2 ◴[04 May 22 16:22 UTC] No.31262577[source]▶
not having to generate, manage, and distribute wireguard secrets and configurations was good enough reason for me to switch.

Tailscale also provides a "magic DNS" service which lets you resolve your Tailscale device names without setting up unbound etc, and which can relay other requests through to your pi-hole or unbound or whatever, which can then listen only on the tailscale IP address, so no need to run an open resolver or deal with source IP filtering.

e: also, you can share devices between tailscale users without generating, managing, distributing wireguard secrets. You send your pal/partner/kid a link and they can access your fileserver or raspberry pi webserver or pihole server for themselves wherever they are.

5. ReverseCold ◴[04 May 22 16:33 UTC] No.31262741[source]▶
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
6. anderspitman ◴[04 May 22 19:55 UTC] No.31265016[source]▶
For more background on just how much Tailscale is doing for you with respect to NAT:

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

7. devman0 ◴[04 May 22 22:14 UTC] No.31266547[source]▶
Is forwarding a single port that difficult in most circumstances? I do realize there are some instances where that is hard like CGNAT, but if I have easy access to wireguard in my network already what does tailscale buy me?
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8. donaldihunter ◴[04 May 22 22:38 UTC] No.31266791{3}[source]▶
I was running Wireguard exactly as you describe, but I'm now using Tailscale because convenience.
9. LoveGracePeace ◴[05 May 22 00:08 UTC] No.31267601[source]▶
I do the same, for multiple domains I own. Definitely not difficult.