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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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)

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