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Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

844 points · 316 comments · jcbhmr

  1. TIPSIO · · focus · HN ↗
    My wife and I have a mobile group/shared bot system where we can make mini apps and collab.

    Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…

    We have Tailscale on our phones and can instantly and privately see without deployment or anything crazy via our secure VPN.

    Think shared Claude Artifacts that don’t live @ Anthropic.

    Tried to first do this with Cloudflare Tunnels (because I love Cloudflare), but between the broken dashboard side of Zero Trust and nightmare of Warp… it was basically impossible to setup. I guess that’s all super enterprise, which seems to be very anti-Cloudflare philosophically to not be able to self do things.

    Will check out Quick Tunnels but I think it’s missing the bigger integration offerings Tailscale has/does still.

    1. theturtletalks · · focus · HN ↗
      Tailscale is truly a cheat code. I have a web app that I run locally to control terminals on my Mac. I access the website on my phone using the 100.xx IP address and can code on the go. No need for a Mac or iOS app.

      You can also use Tailscale serve to get a HTTPS url like Cloudflared but it's only visible to your tailnet. Be careful using Cloudflare tunnels because they are public and bots start poking around immediately.

      1. girvo · · focus · HN ↗
        I love TailScale but was getting crazy battery drain on my iPhone with it installed and setup. Still use it, just not from my phone now
        1. devilbunny · · focus · HN ↗
          Were you using an exit node? Because that really does hammer the battery, but vanilla TS without a bunch of traffic doesn't seem to do much to mine.

          The only always-on TS service on my phone is Immich for photo backup, and I don't take enough photos for that to matter much.

          1. aborsy · · focus · HN ↗
            You should compare battery consumption of TS exit node with something like WG app which low
            1. devilbunny · · focus · HN ↗
              WG gonna punch through NAT for me?

              My endpoint is a pretty stable (though technically dynamic) IPv4 on one end, but the other might be a cell phone with CGNAT, some random WiFi, blah blah etc. TS does that. If you don't want to use it, cool. Don't. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs to use TS for now. That could change in the future.

              1. yesb · · focus · HN ↗
                No but hole punching isn't really needed in that scenario. Open a port on the IPv4 side + dyanmic DNS. More than likely that is what tailscale is doing for you. Opening a port on that end w/UPnP. But can't argue with how simple it is with tailscale.
                1. devilbunny · · focus · HN ↗
                  Yeah, I could do that, and it would work for most of the time, but TS does it for even the weird cases when I’m away from home and can’t play with it.

                  EDIT:good call, though.

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