tinc
tailscale
tinc | tailscale | |
---|---|---|
21 | 1,053 | |
2,049 | 23,642 | |
0.9% | 3.8% | |
5.1 | 9.9 | |
11 months ago | 5 days ago | |
C | Go | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
tinc
- Tailscale Is Pretty Useful
- The New Internet
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Would we still create Nebula today?
But both Nebula and tinc max out at around 1 Gbit/s on my Hetzner servers, thus not using most of my 10 Gbit/s connectivity. This is because they cap out at 100% of 1 CPU. The Nebula issue about that was closed due to "inactivity" [2].
I also observed that when Nebula operates at 100% CPU usage, you get lots of package loss. This causes software that expects reasonable timings on ~0.2ms links to fail (e.g. consensus software like Consul, or Ceph). This in turn led to flakiness / intermittent outages.
I had to resolve to move the big data pushing softwares like Ceph outside of the VPN to get 10 Gbit/s speed for those, and to avoid downtimes due to the packet loss.
Such software like Ceph has its own encryption, but I don't trust it, and that mistrust was recently proven right again [3].
So I'm currently looking to move the Ceph into WireGuard.
Summary: For small-data use, tinc and Nebula are fine, but if you start to push real data, they break.
[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc/issues/218
[2]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/637
[3]: https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...
- Which overlay network?
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Tailscale/golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets
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).
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Tunneling to Synology NAS without opening ports.
Two other options are Tinc https://tinc-vpn.org/ or Nebula https://www.defined.net/nebula/
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Port Forward Security & Alternatives
And there is Tinc; the OG overlay network. I don't have experience with this. Seemed a bit of a pain to setup. https://tinc-vpn.org
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WireGuard multihop available in the Mullvad app
For what its worth I have used the open source Tinc VPN [1] for mesh multihop routing for ages. It is nowhere near as fast as Wireguard but I could envision Tinc incorporating support for Wireguard if the author were so inclined. Like you mentioned Tinc does not mesh with other VPN's AFAIK.
[1] - https://tinc-vpn.org/
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You may not need Cloudflare Tunnel. Linux is fine
This is actually very simple in concept and is just as simple or even simpler to do with tinc (https://tinc-vpn.org).
Since I can use tinc in bridge mode, I can run tinc on the upstream server and on a local machine which then provides access to several physical machines without running extra software on each of those machines, which is particularly useful for machines that are resource limited, like my Macintosh LC II and LC III+:
http://elsie.zia.io/
It'd be nice if it weren't so difficult to get public addresses.
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Tinc Is Not Catan
I clicked expected some broken analogy between https://tinc-vpn.org/ and the Catan board game, but instead it is a Catan implementation. Fair enough.
tailscale
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Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
The fact that most new programming services and products are oriented towards C-suite types, and not to the people who actually use them.
Most websites looks like [1] or [2] which are full of corporate-friendly buzzwords but don't help me understand what they actually do or how they work. To get a concrete understanding I need to go to github and find repos that actually use the product to even understand what it's for.
[1] https://www.astronomer.io/
[2] https://tailscale.com/
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Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
Tailscale uses the same range as CGNAT.
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/12829
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A Technical Look at Iran's Internet Shutdowns
> WireGuard uses UDP and a small handshake footprint, making detection and blocking via DPI harder.
Not true. Wireguard is already actively detected and suppressed if necessary. There's already a fork that employ basic changes to improve the protocol in this regard. AmneziaWG that's shown to be more robust.
https://docs.amnezia.org/documentation/amnezia-wg/
Too bad managing WG is such a pain and Tailscale/Netbird don't support this protocol yet.
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/10696
https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/1096
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tailscale VS Wiredoor - a user suggested alternative
2 projects | 8 Jul 2025
- Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok
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Remote Homelab Admin with Tailscale
Tailscale is a super cool networking tool, and Iximiuz Labs Playgrounds are a great place to run a Remote Homelab, so I thought I'd smash em together and make a super cool tech sandwich!
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Self-hosting like a final boss: what I actually run on my home lab (and why)
Tailscale: mesh VPN, zero config. Just install and forget. Perfect for personal/private access.
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Your laptop can run a full devops stack here’s how I set mine up
Optional: Use Tailscale to access your lab from any device securely
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HomeLab
For accessing my server from outside and anywhere, I use Tailscale. This service creates a VPN between all your desired devices. It offers much better security and less risk than using port forwarding or exposing ports/services to the whole internet. Runs fantastic — and even for free!
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EasyTier – P2P mesh VPN written in Rust using Tokio
How does this compare to Tailscale?
Rust vs Go is one difference. What else?
Tailscale: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale
What are some alternatives?
OpenVPN - OpenVPN is an open source VPN daemon
netbird - Connect your devices into a secure WireGuard®-based overlay network with SSO, MFA and granular access controls.
SoftEther - Cross-platform multi-protocol VPN software. Pull requests are welcome. The stable version is available at https://github.com/SoftEtherVPN/SoftEtherVPN_Stable.
headscale - An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server
Nebula - A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security
AdGuardHome - Network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server