Hacker News Reader

Comment by yewenjie | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like this feature isn't NextDNS specific and can it replaced with anything?

I believe so. This is the issue that was tracking it - https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/2452

Configuring DNS in general was there before, but there are a couple of NextDNS-specific things that went live: automatically using DoH when using NextDNS, setting profiles on a per-device basis so you can vary what things are blocked or not, and optionally sending client info to NextDNS so that your NextDNS dashboard gives you a better picture of what devices are querying what.

And there's a little UI polish coming for the admin panel to show NextDNS configuration a bit more cleanly, but that's not live yet.

Difference being you can now set IPv6 DNS servers. It's been a while since I tried but this wasn't possible or I did something wrong prior.

Using ipv4 NextDNS servers returned 'youre using NextDNS but without configuration'.

Then sign me up! I have my own unbound instance.. but also been pretty happy just using custom /etc/hosts files, so not feeling a strong incentive to shave this yak right now.

That was exactly my reaction. Seems like some kind of publicity stunt by both companies.

You can't deny, at this point in its life, marketing is king for a newly-minted unicorn like Tailscale, as it eyes that Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership position for Zero Trust Networks ;)

There was engineering work on both sides for us to launch this. I did much of the Tailscale side.

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/2452 links to all the client commits.

There was also a lot of control plane stuff to let you specify config for different NextDNS profiles per tags/groups/users/etc.

And NextDNS improved some things on their side too, especially around passing device info to them.

And then, yes, we publicized it after working on it. And closed that bug.

Is there any info on how it interacts with Magic DNS?

No different than the interaction between MagicDNS & any other upstream DNS (Google, Cloudflare, your own, etc).

The built-in resolver at 100.100.100.100 handles the *.your-tailscale-suffix names in your tailnet and the rest that doesn't match goes upstream. Basically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com