‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Making Tailscale Faster

250 points · 112 comments · yarapavan

  1. miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
    Re: Tailscale and speeds, I wish Tailscale had a better story about relay / DERP flexibility.

    Assume we have devices a, b and c, which are basically in different segments of the same network and have nice pings to each other. We're trying to ssh from a to c, but NAT traversal isn't possible. Both a and c can do NAT traversal to b.

    Instead of a going all the way over to the DERP in WAW and then back to c again, it could go a->b->c instead.

    In my experience, DERPs are pretty slow and have high latency (compared to not going off-network at all), but there's no real way to avoid them if everything you have is behind some sort of NAT, even if some of them are trivially traversable (think "devices can do UPNP").

    1. jaxxstorm · · focus · HN ↗
      you appear to be describing a peer relay: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailscale.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;features&#x2F;peer-relay" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tailscale.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;features&#x2F;peer-relay

      Note: I&#x27;m a tailscale employee

      1. miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
        Yes, except peer relays require the peer not to be behind NAT instead of being behind traversable NAT.

        What I&#x27;m thinking of is something far more opportunistic; the way to piggyback on an existing peer (or a set of such) as a pseudo-relay, if and only if network conditions allow, and this is actually something that is worth doing in the given situation.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.