if-then-else VS pam

I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer viable for this is the terrible state of translation from English to German. Instead of using the "established" German terms, English terms are usually translated 1:1 to German, usually by machine translation, or bad human translators who don't have a technological background.

And instead of this butchering of the fine German language, just switching to English is indeed the better alternative.

My favourite trivia is that the 'else' in 'if-else' is a bad translation from German into English btw ;) (https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...)

There is a neat history of the early syntax of conditional expressions here https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el... titled “if-then-else had to be invented”. It seems “else” originated in Algol 60 as a hasty translation from German. The CPL project started in the early 1960s when it was not yet certain that Algol-style block structure and keywords would become the common basis of most programming languages.

If..then..else had to be invented

Not to mention that linux-pam's `[success=2 default=ignore]` isn't even standard, I think OpenPAM only has the five control flags required/requisite/sufficient/binding/optional. (One may reasonably despair as to the difference between "required" and "requisite".)

It's almost as if PAM were developed before the invention of the if-then-else construct in the 1950s.[0]

[0]: https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-el...

> I know it says it's linux-only right now, but is that client side or server only? Can my Windows users TailSSH into linux boxes?

Linux-only on the server right. macOS support is kinda there (in git) but not entirely done and not included in the GUI builds. Windows server support is tracked in https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/4697.

You can use any SSH client from any OS.

> Would be cool if somehow it could wedge into sudo auth so you could login as a a user and sudo without password if allowed by ACLs

Some of the start of that is in https://github.com/tailscale/pam

> One thing that has prevented me from trying Tailscale, despite the great word on the street, is I can't figure out pricing, despite contacting sales. I'd like to run it on ~120 dev+stg+prod VMs, with 10 people (devs, testers, ops). I'd like every box to talk over tailscale directly, as an overlay network, but servers I hope aren't users, that'd get expensive fast. But I need more devices than 10/user. I presume "custom" would help with that but I got no reply from sales. We are probably too small fry. Now that I'm typing this, I realize I guess we could just buy ~15-20 users despite needing only 10.

You only pay for unique humans, not tagged role account devices. I wonder if your email got eaten as spam or something. Email me (username at tailscale) and copy sales@ and I'll make sure somebody replies. But I don't think you need a custom plan.

> I think I've resolved myself to setting up Nebula for the server overlay network, and using Tailscale for physical users, with a traditional firewall bridging them.

Hey, if you've got something that works, stick with it. :)