golink VS wesher

Something else interesting they're doing is their tsnet package, which lets you join your process to the tailnet and bind tcp listeners/connect to TCP services via their tailnet IP or subnet.

I'm writing some stuff using this at the moment, but I also just saw https://github.com/tailscale/golink which does the same thing: a single binary that runs a link shortener that joins itself to your tailnet.

tl;dr: don't run your service on a machine then join that to tailnet, directly bind your service to an in-memory tailnet client

https://github.com/costela/wesher

Wiresmith: Rust, auto-configs clients into a mesh

Maybe take a look at Wesher https://github.com/costela/wesher

I run a Wireguard mesh network with Wesher, and I am pretty sure that there are other projects to automate this. Is there a reason not to use them?

From a purely networking perspective, there are far better solutions than tailscale.

Have a look at full mesh VPNs like:

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

https://github.com/costela/wesher

These build actual mesh networks where every node is equal and can serve as a router for other nodes to resolve difficult network topologies (where some nodes might not be connected to the internet, but do have connections to other nodes with an internet connection).

Sending data through multiple routers is also possible. They also deal with nodes disappearing and change routes accordingly.

tailscale (and similar solutions like netbird) still use a bunch of "proxy servers" for that. You can set them up on intermediate nodes, but that have to be dealt with manually (and you get two kinds of nodes).

There are two factors at play here. The client's public IP actually depends on the gateway they use on accessing the internet. You can disable routing and your clients will keep their public IP and general internet access won't go through the VPS. However, if you want the traffic between "clients" also skip the VPS, then you want a mesh network. wesher and wg-meshconf can help you on configuring them.

Have you considered https://github.com/costela/wesher or does this not fit your use case?

I use Hashicorp Consul and Hashicorp Nomad for service discovery and task scheduling respectively, with wesher for my internal private management network that Consul, Nomad, etc run on to protect the management interfaces. Fabio bridges the gap between the wesher wireguard VPN and the rest of my home network.

How does your solution compare to wesher?

How does it compare to https://github.com/costela/wesher?