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Comment by brainbag | Hacker News Reader

What problems does it solve? Is it just a "shared network" VPN? The web site says what it is but not why.

It's BeyondCorp done at a network layer. You have cryptographic trust that traffic from specific IP ranges are specific people, you get a flat network topology for your infra/team/etc, and it works in the most hostile network environments.

The tailscale team has gone through great lengths to handle a lot of edge cases and hacks in the infrastructure at many corporate networks.

It gives you access to your machines from across the Internet.

It seems to basically be tinc but “modernized”

What about printers/scanners? Can it make your entire LAN available over a single device?

It can, see https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets/ . There's more work for us to do for more "automagic" behavior. For example, I want my home desktop to offer proxying to my printer without having to set up a full-fat subnet router.

That's awesome. That would have been the only thing stopping me from trying it out.

That's what it is not why. For most people the response to this will be "why would I want to do that?"

There may be good reasons. But they'll need to be explicitly spelled out for most users.

It sounds like you'd want it if you have machines on your local network that you want to use when you're not at home. (Or you have some other machines somewhere else.)

If you just have mobile devices and always take them with you, or don't care about accessing a desktop computer when you're away, it's maybe not that interesting?

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