How do you use Tailscale? - eviltoast

I’ve read a lot of recommendations for tailscale and am on my way to try it out myself. Do you use Tailscale in the “normal” way or do you host your own Headscale server (as I’m planning to do)? Any pros and cons?

  • TurboLag@lemmings.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Tailscale doesn’t require you to wrestle with certs or the networking setup required to do NAT traversal. And they do it well, you don’t have to wonder whether you’ve screwed something up that’s degrading NAT traversal only in certain conditions. It just works. That said, I’ve been through the wringer already on these topics so Headscale is not painful for me.

    Does Headscale require additional work to deal with NAT traversal on clients? Or is it just for the controller node itself?

    • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You connect to Headscale using the tailscale clients, and configuration is exactly the same irrespective of which control server you use… with the exception of having to configure the custom server url with Headscale (which requires navigating some hoops and poor docs for mobile/windows clients).

      But to my knowledge there are no client-side configs related to NAT traversal (which is kind of the goal… to work seamlessly everywhere). The configs themselves on the headscale server aren’t so bad either, but the networking concepts involved are extremely advanced, so debugging if anything goes sideways or validating that your server-side NAT traversal setup is working as expected can be a deep dive. With Tailscale, you know any problems are client-side and can focus your attention accordingly… which simplifies initial debugging quite a lot.