stonecharioteerI Traced My Traffic Through a Home Tailscale Exit Node
https://tech.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2026/tailscale-exit-nodes/
Tailscale is interesting. It's built on top of wiregaurd but is different in that it creates a mesh of vpn connections between your devices, rather than just a connection from client to server.
I haven't used it because I use witeguard the traditional way and haven't needed a mesh of devices. Also I haven't taken time to investigate the private company offering it and what sorts of my information is vulnerable if I use it.
This is my question too... It's concerning to me that everyone one seems to be using tailscale (and maybe cloudflare access) and that I don't see mention of open source alternatives. I'm sure for some network experts the alternatives are obvious? Setup a server somewhere publically available that runs ??? and have it be your auth/rendezvous server.
people complain about github being proprietary but I haven't seen much complaint about tailscale being proprietary.
I assume I'm just being overly paranoid? It's certainly convenient to just sign up and have things just work.
There is a well documented opensource alternative to Tailscale - Headscale. The tailscale client is already opensource, Headscale is opensource drop in replacement for the control server which isn't, and fully compatible with Tailscale clients:
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
If you can be bothered running the headscale container, you never need to pay for tailscale. It's been pretty well supported and widely used for a number of years at this point.
