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Comment by sureglymop | Hacker News Reader

Nothing personal against tailscale but I hope it drives the point home that leaving the hosting of the key exchange server for your mesh network to an external entity is a little bit ridiculous.

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My self hosted stuff has outages too. The even more annoying part is that it stays broken until I get around to fixing it.

Imagine if stays broken until somebody else gets around to fixing it

There are more somebody elses than there are mes.

And for some specific somebody, fixing the problem is their whole job. It’s definitely not my whole job. Maybe not even my job at all (if it’s something I just use as part of a personal hobby.)

Sure would be a shame if they all got together and decided some things for you. But that would never happen. Right?

Craftsman guilds don’t scale, alas.

Cloud providers have enormous economic incentive to recover from outages as fast as possible and can bring many more people to help, often ones who wrote the code and designed the system. I once worked for a state government where the exchange server was down for two weeks.

I had to deal with a state Medicaid system that would go down often. If it crashed after 5pm, it was down until the next morning when someone rebooted the SunOS box. (Yes, they just rebooted the box, and no, in 2014 it was still sunos, not Solaris). Meanwhile, it’s messing up pharmacy authorization for thousand of elderly and low income people in the state ….

I heat my house with a wood stove, I'm not part of the energy grid.

I run my own WireGuard because I like to be the one responsible.

To each their own, no need for snark comments.

I ran my own Wireguard for years, but its too clunky and difficult to put all my devices on it. And if the power at my house goes out, the net is fully down. I suppose its a trade-off for using Tailscale now, with a great command line tool and a great UI so I have actually onboarded the rest of my family here. It was too much of a hassle with plain Wireguard nodes.

If your key exchange server is on us-east-1 are you also ridiculous?

For me tailscale being down just means I can't access things I'm not comfortable exposing publicly outside my home. It isn't a huge deal as I rarely have that need.

And if I am at home, the box is upstairs. I can connect a keyboard and monitor and continue about my business.

with Tailscale Lock you have a lot more control, you can also self-host your coordinator server which is an alternative even mentioned in the service docs[0]

[0] https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

Are self-hosted solutions impervious to outages? I wasn't aware.

Who said that

"sureglymop" certainly implied it, otherwise I don't know what the point of that comment was.

In my comment I didn't specify this but I was thinking more about security than operations when I wrote it.

As LeoPanthera said, it is clearly implied.

I read the implication as: being at the mercy of a third party. You can do nothing.

Surely we aren't meant to believe that having some critical part of our lives or businesses dependent on a third party is "a little bit ridiculous"?

I don't imagine I should be expected to launch my own bank or semiconductor fab.

In the context of software

So we are all expected to build our own payment processors in order to not be ridiculous?

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