undefined

points

[-]

Their use of addressing by keys instead of by IPs seems to be the main differentiator. Also the support for custom transports (BLE, LoRa, Tor) which appears to be in progress and not yet fully implemented.

I love Tailscale, it's deployed on all my devices. But I might check this out for the transports part in particular.

by RationPhantoms4 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Tailscale uses MagicDNS which allows one to auto-generate a semi-memorable private hostname as well. I'm in the networking industry so I'm not seeing anything truly groundbreaking or that isn't offered elsewhere.

by danudey4 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

The pitch here appears to be that this can allow communication between services without having to add them to a tailnet or such; e.g. if you wanted to let a friend or coworker access some service on your local network without making them join a tailnet, add a public external endpoint to forward traffic, set up a VPN, etc.

IIUC you just send someone 'here is the connection information' and it just works automatically.

by forsalebypwner4 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

Yeah and my understanding of Iroh wasn't quite right either, it sounds like it's positioned to be more of a library to use in code, rather than a VPN solution like Tailscale.

I love MagicDNS - A long time ago I wrote a stupid Python script to have it continually generate MagicDNS names until one of them contained a word I was looking for.

by hazkoulia5 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

My 5 second summary: Tailscale connects devices and Iroh connects applications.

by dignifiedquire4 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Tailscale is built to be global to your device, while iroh is built to be embedded into each application. This allows application developers and users a much more fine grained and bespoke setup, than having a single global bridge.

by kkapelon4 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

you can embed tailscale on the application level https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tsnet

by nemothekid3 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

This isn't the same functionality - if I'm shipping a video conferencing application, tsnet would require all my customers be in my tailnet.

by kkapelon3 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

but if I am shipping a video conferencing application (where I control both the client and the server) I don't need nat traversal anymore. My clients will have outgoing connections to whichever co-ordination server I choose.

Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.

by nemothekid9 minutes ago|

parent|

[-]

>My clients will have outgoing connections to whichever co-ordination server I choose.

Then it's no longer p2p? If I wanted to avoid paying cloud egress costs, then I would need a p2p solution.

>Tailscale is great for bringing devices/apps into a secure network when I cannot modify them in any way. If I have full access to the source code for everything, the story changes completely.

Naturally, but this thread isn't about Tailscale, its about Iroh. You were the one that claimed Tailscale can already do what Iroh can. But I've pointed out a usecase where Tailscale wouldn't suffice that Iroh can accomplish.

by ranguna3 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

What if you build a p2p video conferencing app with user controlled co-ordinator "server". Server in quotes, because maybe iroh works through the browser?