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An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

116 points6 hoursgithub.com
SuperShibe2 hours ago

Every few months I come back to this repo to check if they finally got Tailnet lock running or if someone security audited them in the meanwhile. Unfortunately neither of these things seem to make any progress and thus, I’ve grown uncertain in how much I can trust this as a core part of my infrastructure.

The entire premise of Tailscale SaaS builds on creating tunnels around your firewalls, then enabling the user to police what is allowed to be routed through these tunnels in a intuitive and unified way.

Headscale seems to have nailed down the part of bypassing the firewall and doing fancy NAT-traversal, but can they also fulfill the second part by providing enough of their own security to make up for anything they just bypassed, or will they descend to just being a tool for exposing anything to the internet to fuck around with your local network admin? To me, not giving your Tailscale implementation any way for the user to understand or veto what the control server is instructing the clients to do while also not auditing your servers code at all sure seems daring…

nativeit2 hours ago

> Headscale seems to have nailed down the part of bypassing the firewall and doing fancy NAT-traversal

Did they really roll-their-own for those functions? I thought this was just a control layer on top of Tailscale’s stock services on the backend, are they facilitating connections with novel methods? Apologies if I’m asking obvious questions, I use ZeroTier pretty regularly, but I am not too familiar with Tailscale.

gpi2 hours ago

One of the maintainers work for tailscale now.

wutwutwat2 hours ago

maintainer's employment != security audit

gpi2 hours ago

My thinking is their time is divided now and could lead to less efforts spent on headscale.

telotortium5 hours ago

Should add the project name, Headscale, to the title

Headscale has been on HN many times.

udev409636 minutes ago

How does headscale hold up when you're streaming video over jellyfin/plex?

voxadam57 minutes ago

Does it run on Plan 9?

mountainriver4 hours ago

Love headscale, we just took it to production and it’s been great

syntaxing4 hours ago

As in you rolled out an internal service for the whole company?!

sshine1 hour ago

I’d love to see a write-up on that.

Especially in the unlikely event that you used Nix for the deployment.

snvzz3 hours ago

Headscale has been serving me well for half a year now. It is great, to the point I have no idea how I lived without a tailscale network before.

It is packaged in openbsd, and that package is the server I am using.

pilif3 hours ago

Keep in mind that for many use cases (mobile access, GUI on macOS), this relies on the official Tailscale clients keeping the ability to set the control server.

The moment the inevitable enshitification will start at Tailscale, this feature will go away.

I’m saying this as a currently super happy Tailscale customer who was burned multiple times in the past by other companies being sold or running out of VC money

risho2 hours ago

arent most of the the tailscale clients open source aside from the gui portion of the non open source os's?

3abiton4 hours ago

This looks interesting! What's the added value over wireguard + openwrt setup?

watusername3 hours ago

Your devices will connect to each other peer-to-peer (even behind complex NATs) with no manual configuration, subject to ACLs you centrally manage. It just works.

People sometimes dismiss Tailscale as "just" a WireGuard orchestrator, but it's actually much more than that - From a product perspective, WireGuard is just an implementation detail.

compootr3 hours ago

it's wireguard that doesn't make me hate myself :)

usagisushi3 hours ago

It's a mesh VPN, so peers communicate directly without additional delay.

I opted for Netbird myself because Headscale's UI felt too basic for me back then. Has that improved over the years probably?

udev409630 minutes ago

How is netbird? Is it more stable than tailscale/headscale? How is your performance while streaming a video?

pluto_modadic4 hours ago

wonder if some of the bugs with self-managing it have been worked out :)