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Comment by IceWreck | Hacker News Reader

Why depend on Tailscale when you can go 100% open source and use slack's nebula or plain old wireguard or one of those open source wireguard manager apps.

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Plain old wireguard doesn't do double-nat hole punching. And many of the open-source alternatives (such as innernet) also don't.

"Plain old wireguard"

In my mind wireguard was still the new kid on the block.

Technology moves so fast.

Same here. Also, in my mind, wireguard just works. I tried setting up OpenVPN one time and gave up. Wireguard was a breath of fresh air. Generated some QR codes for my mobile devices, rsynced some .conf files to my machines and I was good to go.

Calling something "plain old" in no way implies that it's old.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plain_old

Have you tried Tailscale? It's just a whole new experience getting all your devices connected in 10 minutes. It's quite something.

I did and the CPU usage on the clients is much higher compared to kernel wireguard or even nebula (userspace, written in go).

Add the fact that it has no advantage over nebula and I stopped using it in a heartbeat.

This is true, on my iPhone 12 mini Tailscale is often the heaviest app (now at 17%) whereas Wireguard never really registered. Strange thing is that on some days Tailscale also barely registers. Could be that the Home Assistant app, which also takes a lot off battery connects via the Tailnet, and it communicates a lot in the background (tracks my position and some other Phone sensors.)

Nebula seems to be under Defined Networking (https://www.defined.net/) now. It lacks the ease and tooling of the multitude of others that emerged in the space. My gut is that it's usable for the clever home user but meant for a professional IT dept with the ability/desire to build their own tooling and automation around it. The spartan mobile app is a sign of such. Tailscale is probably more easily usable for the average user than nebula or even vanilla wireguard.

Because the whole point of Tailscale is that it's zero config, I don't really want ot mess about with wireguard.

Former Wireguard user here. It's fantastic for point to point VPN but I moved to Tailscale last week and it's so much better having all of my devices on one flat network. Not to mention getting my parents devices on there with no config.

Now image having twenty employees running Wireguard. Having to send them keys and configs, off boarding and managing it.

Tailscale (or Headscale for that matter if you host it yourself) is magical in comparison.

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Or why not the open source tool innernet? https://github.com/tonarino/innernet

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