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Comment by plantinthebok | Hacker News Reader

What's the actual win here? Avoiding relay latency in the rare cases Tailscale can't punch through NAT? If that's it, a $3 VPS running Headscale seems simpler. The complexity feels like you're optimizing for the 5% case while adding permanent vendor lock in. What am I missing?

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Tailscale has what they call Peer Relays now to help solve this problem:

https://tailscale.com/blog/peer-relays-beta

$3 VPS running Headscale is not simpler since you won't be able to run both headscale and tailscale on your end user machines, I don't recommend it.

The solution we've found is running a white IP container (or VPS) which looks like regular Wireguard outside, while inside it "forwards" to your existing tailscale network.

I don't remember if we use https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker or https://github.com/juhovh/tailguard

Also see: https://tailscale.com/blog/peer-relays-beta

For many homelabbers, just being cheap and avoiding the $3 VPS, that's it

I dont even pay anything, my tiny homelab is completely covered by the free tier

What provider still has decent free tier?

Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.

Which region were you able to create this in? They seem to be out of capacity all the time in EU.

I have read that you need to write a script to constantly bombard their API in order to get one. I presume you'd be fighting other scripts.

What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.

It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.

The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.

That can't possibly be free?

That’s generous but Oracle is very generous.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Only caveat I see is they reserve the right to delete underutilized/ idling instances

I guess they require a credit card before accessing that free tier?

If they do: create a virtual one, create an account with it and delete the card right after.

An honest advise being down-voted?

Thanks

I upvoted you.

Exactly, just today I set up a cloudflare tunnel to a docker compose service running on my home server. I didn’t want to expose the server directly to the internet, and I want to share this service on a certain domain with broader family.

I have a server at home that works well. I don’t reaaaally want to pay an extra $30-$40/yr and have an extra thing to manage when the CF tunnel works fine for free. I like Tailscale more, but I want to share this with family who won’t install TS and also want to use a specific domain.

What does Headscale have to do with NAT hole punching? I believe what you actually mean is setting up a relay, see the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948806 .

I don't think you are missing anything. They have a bunch of half baked features like this that aren't as robust as real security vendors and lock you in just like you said.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something…

But are you accusing someone of promoting vendor lock-in (cloudflare) while at the same time promoting vendor lock-in (tailscale)?

If you’re ok with vendor lock-in, shouldn’t you in theory be ok with any vendor?

Headscale is the not-vendor-login version of Tailscale.

Sort of. Many tailscale clients you would use with headscale are closed source.

No. Not all vendors are equal. We can treat ProtonMail differently then Gmail, for example. Looking at what's gone down with VMware, definitely don't get in bed with Broadcom.

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