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Comment by password4321

3 years ago

Cloudflare tunnels expose ports publicly.

Tailscale must be properly configured on your client machine to access machines/ports on their respective private Tailscale network(s), setup of which typically requires administrative intervention. Without bridging to a public network, services exposed to the Tailscale network are not accessible publicly.

Tailscale does offer user-mode clients so it can be used similarly to SSH by those allowed to connect (I don't know how difficult user-mode Tailscale is without admin setup on various operating systems).

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password4321

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jatone  3 years ago

not sure where you're getting the idea you need admin intervention for tailscale. I've never needed to do anything beyond authenticate the machine with my account. tailscale has NAT traversal built into it.

If your network firewall is preventing the tunneling process, then that's on you. and if its not on you and its a company decision then its VERY unlikely they'd be okay with cloudflare's publicly exposed ports.

  • pmarreck  3 years ago

    tailscale user here.

    the tailscale devices you see are only accessible by other devices on the same tailscale network.

    S/he's talking about accessing those machines from OUTSIDE that network. That's what would require admin intervention. So for example if I have a webserver on my home LAN that has Tailscale installed and authenticated, then sure, I can access that webserver from any of my other Tailscale devices from anywhere. But if I want a friend to be able to access that webserver without first being authenticated to the Tailscale network... Do you see the problem, yet?

    • jatone  3 years ago

      I clearly understand that problem. but I'm just going to assert its not what you actually want. nor is it related to accessing ssh where you most definitely don't want to expose the port.

      for starters, what you're describing is a load balancer. those already exist and are trivial to setup.

  • password4321  3 years ago

    I'm talking about the one-time initial setup of the Tailscale client software.

    Can you download and run Tailscale on a Windows client without Administrative access to install the software (setup the virtual NIC)? An SSH client is just a user-space app.