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Tailscale raises $100M

(tailscale.com)
854 points gmemstr | 2 comments | 04 May 22 13:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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boesboes ◴[04 May 22 13:43 UTC] No.31260274[source]▶
For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is:

> Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other.

It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authentication etc etc

Neat! No sure how that is 'fixing internet' exactly, but really cool anyway

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yrro ◴[04 May 22 13:55 UTC] No.31260446[source]▶
Tailscale is one of the ways you can restore the end-to-end connectivity principle that IP introduced and that NAT destroyed.
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legalcorrection ◴[04 May 22 13:59 UTC] No.31260512[source]▶
This is kind of overstated. Even if everyone went IPv6 and gave every device a public IP address, pretty much every network would have a firewall that behaved just like NAT.
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1. dave_universetf ◴[04 May 22 15:51 UTC] No.31262162[source]▶
Our epic treatise on how NAT traversal works (in general, not specific to Tailscale) mentions this. IPv6 greatly reduces the amount of pain for p2p connections, but does not eliminate some of the fundamentals (stateful firewall traversal) if you want it to be zero-config: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

But until deployment hits 100%, and until ISPs start caring about IPv6 reliability the way they do about IPv4, "just use IPv6" can't be your answer. It's lovely when it works, but you need to do something other than "give up" when it doesn't. (also, as long as the internet is dual-stacked, doing IPv6 right also implies figuring out if NAT64 is in play, and wielding it correctly; so arguably IPv6 adds more complexity to the overall story, for now :) )

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2. legalcorrection ◴[05 May 22 10:52 UTC] No.31271734[source]▶
Very cool write-up. Thank you all for writing (and linking) it.