Have you tried Tailscale?

Tailscale is a company building on Wireguard technology. Since they offer 20 free devices for personal use, and people are saying good things about it, I gave it a try. An Arch:

  • sudo pacman -S tailscale
  • sudo start tailscaled
  • sudo enable tailscaled
  • sudo tailscale up

This presented me with the following:

To authenticate, visit:

        https://login.tailscale.com/a/as43199261e6

(numbers changed).

I then installed app on phone and when through similar process. Now when I log into Tailscale, I see:

(IP address erased …)

Looking up what these 100.x.x.x IP address are:

Tailscale assigns each node on your network a unique 100.x.y.z address. This address stays stable for each node (a device or a server), which means it should not change, no matter where the device moves to in the physical world.

To test, I was able to ping my phone from a Linux computer.

I then disabled WiFi on phone, and was still able to ping phone.

This was super easy to set up – I’m impressed.

The tailscale client is OSS:

Some articles about the Tailscale vision:

Interesting stuff:

@khem pointed out this project:

It is interesting they use Nix for development. Probably some other useful tips to learn from their build/CI setup:

Contributing

To contribute to headscale you would need the lastest version of Go and Buf(Protobuf generator).

We recommend using Nix to setup a development environment. This can be done with nix develop, which will install the tools and give you a shell. This guarantees that you will have the same dev env as headscale maintainers.

PRs and suggestions are welcome.

Code style

To ensure we have some consistency with a growing number of contributions, this project has adopted linting and style/formatting rules:

The Go code is linted with golangci-lint and formatted with golines (width 88) and gofumpt. Please configure your editor to run the tools while developing and make sure to run make lint and make fmt before committing any code.

The Proto code is linted with buf and formatted with clang-format.

The rest (Markdown, YAML, etc) is formatted with prettier.

Check out the .golangci.yaml and Makefile to see the specific configuration.

golangci looks interesting.

You can learn a lot from looking at the build systems for other projects. Lots of neat tooling available for CI …