From the newsletter:
We’ve recently released tailcat, a remix of pieces of Tailscale that gives you a way to use the open-source Tailscale data plane without the Tailscale control plane, written by the people who made Tailscale.
Specifically, tailcat is both an open-source Go package and a CLI tool using that package. It lets you run a server-side listener and a client to connect to that server, moving bidirectional bytes back and forth.
Potential usage info from the website link - https://tailscale.com/tailcat:
Setting up a tailnet makes sense when you need governable access, identity, and policy. Sometimes you don’t. You might need to SSH into a development environment for an hour. Give an agent access to a test machine for one task. Connect a game session. Move a file between two machines. Tailcat gives you a secure connection without requiring either side to become part of a larger network.
A technical explanation from the github:
Tailcat is a remix of Tailscale open source pieces to act like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane, without Tailscale’s control plane. Tailscale’s data plane (magicsock, internally) gives you point-to-point WireGuard®-encrypted tunnels between two machines with DERP as the NAT-hole-punching communication side channel and the ultimate relay-of-last-resort if NAT traversal fails. Instead of using the Tailscale control plane, all tailcat connection metadata is exchanged out of band, however you want.
License: BSD 3-Clause License
No, but if you wanted to do that, headscale is the answer
Headscale any easier to config nowadays?
I’d tried running it ages ago, but I was very new to Linux, and nixos as a whole. Eventually gave up and just ran tailscale for ease of use.
I followed the compose file in the docs with podman and it was fine, configured headplane as the management gui inside the same compose. I then later converted the compose to a quadlet and it continues to be fine. I leave it alone, it leaves me alone
Nice, thanks for the info.
I’ll give it another go hopefully on my one day off over this long weekend 😅
Having less reliance on major tech providers is something I’m slowly moving towards, probably like lots of us here.