Hacker News Reader

Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

I love TailScale but was getting crazy battery drain on my iPhone with it installed and setup. Still use it, just not from my phone now

View on HN

I have the same experience and I once found a GitHub issue about it. I don’t think it sounded like they planned to fix it anytime soon. I just added the Tailscale toggle button to my phone’s quick control panel and turn it on whenever I want to check all my syncthing nodes or something. I keep meaning to see if I can script up something with Shortcuts to make it turn back off automatically.

Were you using an exit node? Because that really does hammer the battery, but vanilla TS without a bunch of traffic doesn't seem to do much to mine.

The only always-on TS service on my phone is Immich for photo backup, and I don't take enough photos for that to matter much.

You should compare battery consumption of TS exit node with something like WG app which low

WG gonna punch through NAT for me?

My endpoint is a pretty stable (though technically dynamic) IPv4 on one end, but the other might be a cell phone with CGNAT, some random WiFi, blah blah etc. TS does that. If you don't want to use it, cool. Don't. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs to use TS for now. That could change in the future.

No but hole punching isn't really needed in that scenario. Open a port on the IPv4 side + dyanmic DNS. More than likely that is what tailscale is doing for you. Opening a port on that end w/UPnP. But can't argue with how simple it is with tailscale.

Yeah, I could do that, and it would work for most of the time, but TS does it for even the weird cases when I’m away from home and can’t play with it.

EDIT:good call, though.

I wasn't, no. I'm not the only one whos hit it either, not sure what the cause is :(

Strange, battery use is negligible on Android, particularly when the tunnel is not in active use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com