Technically it's not NAT64 today. Different prefix for one, but it's also not translated at the IP layer (yet). For TCP, we terminate the TCP in tailscaled and make a new TCP connection out and switch them together, so packets are not 1:1 end-to-end.
We also had grander plans for the 32 "site-id" bits in the middle there. Instead of just a 8-bit (now 16-bit) "site ID" number in there, you could actually put the 32-bit CGNAT IPv4 address of any peer of yours, and then access its IPv4 space relative to that node, without any configuration.
Say you have an Apple TV plugged in at home.
Then you're at a coffee shop and want to access something on your LAN and don't have a subnet router set up.
You should be able to `ssh 10-0-0-5-via-appletv.foo-bar.ts.net` and have MagicDNS map that "appletv" as the "Site ID" and put its 32-bit CGNAT address in, and then parse out the 10.0.0.5 as the lower 32-bits, and then have Tailscale route your packets via your home Apple TV node.
All subject to ACLs, of course, but we could make it a default or easy-to-enable recommended default that you could do such things as an admin for your self-owned devices.
So why it's called "4via6"? That was just kinda a temporary internal name that ended up leaking out to docs/KB and now a blog post, apparently. :)
Not a single purely negative comment here as of the time i'm writing this. Maybe a criticism or two, but no one has a "dislike".
If that's a big yes it costs you no more and you can stream like that with high bandwidth and no throttling because perhaps I won't have any negative comments either :)
Thanks and I apologize in advance for imposing on you.
My journey was: Wireguard (dropped because it is pain in the ass to configure and poor Windows support) -> Tailscale (dropped because it had RCEs at the time) -> Nebula (needs a separate service that issues host certificates, or manual clunky process) -> Yggdrasil. This was for personal stuff, but now I am also using it for my p2p GPU cloud startup (see https://borg.games/setup).
In comparison to other options I found Yggdrasil to be straightforward to setup:
1. Get it
2. Edit yggdrasil.conf to add public peers you want to connect to. You can get them from https://publicpeers.neilalexander.dev/
3. Repeat on all machines (Android is supported, unsure about iOS)
Now they have access to each other and everyone else in Yggdrasil by their _permanent_ Yggdrasil IPv6 address (derived from PrivateKey in yggdrasil.conf).
OPTIONAL quality-of-life stuff:
4. add Listen entries to yggdrasil.conf and a corresponding port forward on your home router then use it as a peer for your out-of-home machines to avoid extra hop to public peers
5. Create a bunch of DNS AAAA (IPv6) at your favorite DNS provider to give your machines names
Extra bonus: they recently added userspace stack support, so you can embed Yggdrasil directly into your app, and use it as a SOCKS proxy: https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggstack
it simple bandwidth but enough for free service and there option to self-host the service anytime you want
(Signed: someone who deployed at scale a scheme that eats 8 octets for two embedded IPv4 addresses, plus an additional 2 octets of signaling).
You can probably guess the next question, if the answer to that one is anything like a "yes"
That said, my experiences with Tailscale have been nothing but positive and I appreciate the work they're doing to simplify Internet connectivity between endpoints inside different LANs and WANs
As a bonus, my family can call the ISP's tech support if anything dysfunction while I'm traveling: my self-hosting crap is perfectly independent from the ISP's standard service. And wait, there's more - I can add services anywhere, such as a backup server at my parent's, regardless of their configuration and with no impact.
So yes, Tailscale all the things... I'm nostalgic for the IPv6 flat end-to-end dream but, in our world of ubiquitous IPv4 NAT horrors, Tailscale functionally surpasses it.
> Honest question- Would a full IPv6 implementation across the board, hurt Tailscale's M.O. and bottom line, assuming all routing worked properly (a big assumption, to be sure)?
Maybe, but even asking the question is kind of conspiratorial. Companies like Cisco, Google, and Apple have been pushing IPv6. A small startup can't somehow hold back IPv6 "world domination" even if they tried.
The key thing it gives you is the ability to define policies about who can talk to what, irrespective of where the endpoints actually are, while also cryptographically protecting your traffic.
On the other hand, if you never ever use anything but HTTPS, then you probably don’t need it and you could do away with it today.
But I haven’t the foggiest what the next question is.
Many network technologies/services exist to manage suboptimal circumstances, which would not be needed in better circumstances.
Arnt•11mo ago
And this tailscale product seems to say "this product makes that kind of situation less awful" which I'm sure is somehow good but I can't help thinking that "less awful" is going to mean "still awful" for most deployments.
rahimnathwani•11mo ago
We had some on-premise hosting, and I figured the easiest thing would be to keep the existing network LAN addressing. Each LAN had a different IP range, so it would be no problem for them to share the same ethernet network, as long as only one of the three LANs provided DHCP for the PCs.
We already had a Cisco router for internet access. That should be able to provide routing between our three LANs, right?
That was a terrible idea, as local traffic was bottlenecked on this small router that wasn't designed for the job. Transfers between LANs were as slow as they'd been when we in different physical locations.
I spent an hour or two consolidating the LAN onto a single IP subnet, and everything worked as you'd expect.