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Comment by bradfitz

2 days ago

Happy to answer any questions!

A bunch of us are currently in https://meet.google.com/qre-gydb-mkv chatting about this. (Edit: the hour is over; we all left)

The earlier Apr 1st blog post was https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...

I've never set up a Plan 9 system... does this allow the distributed systems communications to run through my Tailnet?

  • Yes, you could do something like keep a small root fs or pack everything into the kernels paqfs to boot into a Tailscale VPN and pull root from another 9 machine on the VPN. Then pull resources in from other machines including non 9 systems.

    Either way it makes VPN easy between 9 and non 9 machines. Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace. But that makes seamless Unix and Windows comms difficult.

    • > Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace

      Note that one of Tailscale's main party tricks is NAT traversal, when both machines are behind different NATs and can't otherwise get a connection open to each other. (And then Tailscale ultimately falls back to a relay server on the internet if it can't get a direct connection for IP packets)

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