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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to do that, but my laptop's and workstation's state inevitably get out of sync leading up to "wait why doesn't this work ... spend a couple of minutes .. ah yes I did X on the other device".

(Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-)

And VNCing into my workstation from the laptop has all the drawbacks that Matthew described in the article.

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If you do your work in VSCode you can setup the following pretty easily and it works really well (I use it to connect to my workstation in my home office when I work in a coffee shop on my laptop or the rare occasions I go into the office):

1. Install Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) on your laptop and workstation and enable the "MagicDNS" (https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns/) feature. This sets up a VPN mesh between your machines (and any other you add).

2. Setup you SSH keys so you can login via the "MagicDNS" domain name from your laptop to your workstation.

3. Install the VSCode Remote Development extension (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview) on your laptop and then open a workspace on your workstation via its SSH feature using the "MagicDNS" domain.

It is surprisingly fast - you are just sending keystrokes/commands over the VPN and not rasterizing the host screen like you would with VNC.

I'm a little confused as to what benefic the "MagicDNS"/Tailscale aspect is adding?

Is this faster than a traditional VPN? Is the VSCode remote development extension not able to function with a traditional VPN?

Tailscale saves time in this. It does things like busting through NATs for you to get the VPN established, useful when on varying networks with the laptop, but yeah it is a wireguard VPN after that.

(Not op, just butting in)

Not OP, but I think the purpose of tailscale w/ magicdns is to create a VPN connection directly between the laptop and desktop, regardless of the underlying network locations of either. I believe tailscale uses connection brokering so all connections can be outbound (no firewall policy / port forwarding). MagicDNS is probably just a quality of life improvement here.

It just makes sshing between the machines by name very easy. You can do the same thing by assigning permanent IPs to all machines in the mesh and then updating all your host files across all the machines in the mesh. Life is too short for that.

Bizarre. Most VPNs used in a workplace would take care of name-based host resolution (ie DNS) for you. This is not a new thing unique to Tailscale.

Having set up OpenVPN a few times, and troubleshooting Cisco VPN, the new thing unique to Tailscale is that it just works.

It takes a few seconds to connect each new machine. It took me way more just to find out how I should configure Cisco's VPN client, and I do not ever want to even think about OpenVPN again.

I've also maintained a WireGuard mesh where I distributed keys and set up /etc/hosts via ansible: add a host to the inventory file, run the playbook - simple.

Yet Tailscale is even simpler than that. And (for my purposes at least) it's free.

I have recently started doing this and it's excellent. I can just wander away from my desktop, take my laptop and go work somewhere else in the house, and I used something very similar going away abroad.

Yeah, already Tailscale / WireGuard user and SSHing all around.

Didn't know VSCode had a headless mode that can be driven over the net (which is what your description sounds like), will definitely check it out, thanks.

If your work already uses tailscale, you can use enclave to achieve the same thing. Enclave and tailscale seem to coexist fine.

> (Before someone suggest "use docker": then I'd need a more powerful workstation and laptop :-)

Why do you believe that to be the case? Docker performance overhead is so minimal I highly doubt you'd be able to tell any difference compared to native processes.

Isn't it a full vm on Macs?

I currently work on a project that involves 28 docker containers (edit: on Linux, so no extra VM overhead like on a Mac), and I definitely can tell the difference compared to native processes.

My main professionnal OS in a Linux booting up from an nvme drive with an usb3 case adapter. The pro laptop I have been given only has a screen resolution of 1366x768 and 16GB of ram. I don't mind too much when using it as a desktop because I have 2 fullhd 24" screens but if I plan to be more mobile and work on one screen, or if I need lots of memory to boot containers and VMS I boot it on my personnal Lenovo. I also boot it sometimes on a desktop in my office while I boot the original windows installation of the pro laptop updating itself and not be forgotten.

I use adhesive velcros so that the drive is secured on the backside of the screen and don't hang from the laptop.

You could use ssh to connect to the workstation and do all your work there, preserving state.

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