An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

345 pointsposted 10 months ago
by quyleanh
(github.com)

84 Comments

SuperShibe

10 months ago

Every few months I come back to this repo to check if they finally got Tailnet lock running or if someone security audited them in the meanwhile. Unfortunately neither of these things seem to make any progress and thus, I’ve grown uncertain in how much I can trust this as a core part of my infrastructure.

The entire premise of Tailscale SaaS builds on creating tunnels around your firewalls, then enabling the user to police what is allowed to be routed through these tunnels in a intuitive and unified way.

Headscale seems to have nailed down the part of bypassing the firewall and doing fancy NAT-traversal, but can they also fulfill the second part by providing enough of their own security to make up for anything they just bypassed, or will they descend to just being a tool for exposing anything to the internet to fuck around with your local network admin? To me, not giving your Tailscale implementation any way for the user to understand or veto what the control server is instructing the clients to do while also not auditing your servers code at all sure seems daring…

bananapub

10 months ago

tailnet lock seems way way less important for headscale than tailscale, given you personally control the headscale infra.

codethief

10 months ago

Depends on your threat model. Mine definitely includes one of my servers getting compromised. (Which, tbh, is probably more likely than Tailscale getting hacked.)

SuperShibe

10 months ago

only until someone finds a zeroday in headscale (remember, it never got audited) or until the server running headscale itself gets compromised. Especially in countries where getting a dedicated public IPv4+IPv6 from your ISP is hard-impossible and you‘d have to rely on a server hosted externally (unless you’re large enough to make deals with the ISP) some company hosting your server still retains at minimum physical control over your headscale infra. For why this is a problem, see the recent Oracle cloud breach.

botto

10 months ago

This is my thought as well, if you are in control then you also control which nodes go on your tailnet

nativeit

10 months ago

> Headscale seems to have nailed down the part of bypassing the firewall and doing fancy NAT-traversal

Did they really roll-their-own for those functions? I thought this was just a control layer on top of Tailscale’s stock services on the backend, are they facilitating connections with novel methods? Apologies if I’m asking obvious questions, I use ZeroTier pretty regularly, but I am not too familiar with Tailscale.

xrd

10 months ago

Can you share why you use ZeroTier over Tailscale? I run several headscale control planes and it really is nice to self-host. But, I'm curious about other options.

password4321

10 months ago

Not OP but I'm on ZeroTier because it was one of the best free tiers available before Tailscale could run as a Windows service.

Also I believe it implements a lower layer of the network stack so more options are supported, though I haven't needed to investigate in detail.

gpi

10 months ago

One of the maintainers work for tailscale now.

wutwutwat

10 months ago

maintainer's employment != security audit

gpi

10 months ago

My thinking is their time is divided now and could lead to less efforts spent on headscale.

palotasb

10 months ago

Not compared to the previous state where he worked for an unrelated company and only had his free time to contribute to Headscale.

kradalby

10 months ago

Person with split time here,

I definitely have more time to spend on it now, I have half a work week vs sometime in the evenings or weekends if I had excess energy after having my other job.

Happily2020

10 months ago

If you're interested in self-hosting your orchestration server, you can look into Netbird. It's a very similar tool, but has the server open sourced as well. So you have a self-hosted control server with a nice GUI and all the features the paid version does.

https://netbird.io/knowledge-hub/tailscale-vs-netbird

davidcollantes

10 months ago

Compared to Headscale, Netbird has so many moving pieces! It looks robust, and powerful, and featureful... yet, self-hosting Headscale is super simple, and less demanding.

mynameisvlad

10 months ago

I've been slowly moving everything over from Tailscale to Netbird and aside from some shenanigans with Tailscale taking over the entire CGNAT route, it works wonderfully!

Tailscale is still running for now, but I'm getting closer and closer to decommissioning it and switching entirely to Netbird.

telotortium

10 months ago

Should add the project name, Headscale, to the title

Headscale has been on HN many times.

infogulch

10 months ago

I think it would be neat if headscale allowed peering / federating between instances. (Maybe after the ACL rework.) One of the main problems is address collisions.

So here's my proposal: commit to ipv6-only overlay network in the unique local address (ULA) range, then split up the remaining 121 bits into 20 low bits for device addresses (~1M) and 101 high bits that are the hash of the server's public key. Federate by adding the public key of the other instance and use policy and ACLs to manage comms between nodes.

I think it's a nice idea, but the maintainer kradalby said it's out of scope when I brought it up in 2023: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/issues/1370

snvzz

10 months ago

Headscale has been serving me well for half a year now. It is great, to the point I have no idea how I lived without a tailscale network before.

It is packaged in openbsd, and that package is the server I am using.

mountainriver

10 months ago

Love headscale, we just took it to production and it’s been great

linsomniac

10 months ago

I've been running headscale for 2.5 years and it's been pretty good. We use our gmail domain for logging in, which gives a big benefit that users can self-serve their devices. Unlike with OpenVPN in the past where ops had to hand off the certs and configs. Really the only downside has been when they accidentally connect to the tailscale login server instead of our own and then can't figure out why they can't reach any services. We use user groups to set up what services users can access.

We are still running the old headscale, because we have some integrations that will need to be ported to the new control plane. According to "headscale node list | wc" we have ~250 nodes, most of them are servers.

One thing I really don't love about tailscale some of the magic it does with the routing tables and adding firewall rules, but it has mostly not been an issue. Tailscale has worked really quite well.

syntaxing

10 months ago

As in you rolled out an internal service for the whole company?!

cassianoleal

10 months ago

As opposed to what? This seems pretty normal.

We considered it as well but there was a feature missing that meant we couldn’t use it for one of our main requirements. Had that not been the case, we’d have rolled it out.

mrklol

10 months ago

Mind sharing which feature?

cassianoleal

10 months ago

Honestly I'm hazy on the details but we're running a fairly complex environment in GCP with PSC everywhere, connections to on-prem and other external environments, and something wouldn't quite work due to all that.

Sorry I can't provide any more details but I really don't remember the specifics. We were in touch with Tailscale engineers and they offered some workarounds that we had already worked out but that wouldn't help us achieve what we were after.

sshine

10 months ago

I’d love to see a write-up on that.

Especially in the unlikely event that you used Nix for the deployment.

benley

10 months ago

I've done exactly that: headscale in production at work, a few hundred client devices, infrastructure mostly powered by nix. What would you want to hear about it?

squiggleblaz

10 months ago

* Does it work well? * Do you recommend it? * Do your users care? * Is it difficult? Do you have to maintain it or is it basically set it and forget it? * What was memorable about setting it up? * Why did you go for Headscale vs Tailscale or Netbird or some other solution?

benley

10 months ago

I posted a reply to another subthread with some of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647368

> * Does it work well?

Very well! There are some limitations (see link above), but what's implemented is reliable.

> * Do you recommend it?

Yes, provided your requirements fit headscale's capabilities. If you need things like device trust attestation (e.g. Kandji MDM or Crowdstrike Falcon integration), SCIM provisioning, or various other enterprise features you may find it inadequate. If you can afford to pay for Tailscale, you should just use Tailscale because it's really good.

> * Do your users care?

They like it way better than our previous OpenVPN setup, that's for sure. I don't think they care about Headscale vs commercial Tailscale - the backend implementation is largely invisible to them.

> * Is it difficult? Do you have to maintain it or is it basically set it and forget it?

Not hard at all to set up, and it requires little maintenance attention. I have barely had to touch the control plane (other than version upgrades) since setting it up a year ago.

> * What was memorable about setting it up?

We had to do some custom coding to have automatic user offboarding when employees leave the company, and to emulate app connectors / dynamic routing (this is now OSS! https://github.com/singlestore-labs/tailscale-manager).

And I've been contributing to the headscale codebase to smooth out some quirks that affected our SSO integration. The headscale authors have been pretty flexible in welcoming outside contributors.

> * Why did you go for Headscale vs Tailscale or Netbird or some other solution?

vs Tailscale: It was way easier to build this myself than to get funding to use the commercial solution. I'm not good navigating corporate politics, but I am pretty good at building infrastructure and writing code.

vs Netbird: Mostly because I already liked Tailscale from using it at home, I like its implementation, and I like the way Tailscale (the company) have behaved. The handful of folks I know who work there are people I deeply respect.

sshine

10 months ago

> headscale in production at work

  - How much effort do you put into key management compared to plain WireGuard?
  - How automated is the onboarding process; do you generate and hand over keys?
  - How do you cope without the commercial Tailscale dashboard?
  - Do you run some kind of dashboard or metrics system?
  - How long did it take to set up?
  - Were there any gotchas?

benley

10 months ago

> - How much effort do you put into key management compared to plain WireGuard?

Less effort than plain wireguard; the only key management I do is for non-human clients

> - How automated is the onboarding process; do you generate and hand over keys?

Fully automated. Auth is done via OIDC to my company's SSO provider, so users can enroll their own machines without IT involvement.

> - How do you cope without the commercial Tailscale dashboard?

I don't really miss it. The headscale CLI tool is pretty good, and I use one of the headscale web UI projects (three are several: https://headscale.net/stable/ref/integration/web-ui/?h=web) for quick access to a few features (https://github.com/gurucomputing/headscale-ui)

> - Do you run some kind of dashboard or metrics system?

Yes, I scrape headscale's Prometheus metrics endpoint and have put together a simple Grafana dashboard. The metrics it emits are somewhat limited, but enough to keep an eye on its health.

> - How long did it take to set up?

I had a prototype up and running on Kubernetes with OIDC integration and a web UI in about 1 day of hacking. Going into full production took a few months, but the majority of that time was about planning the migration of all the existing users from OpenVPN.

Come to think of it, maybe I should share my terraform modules for deploying it.

> - Were there any gotchas?

A few, yeah:

- Setting up mobile clients is a bit fiddly, because they hide the "connect to a non-default control plane URL" under a debug menu. The mac and windows apps are similar - it's too easy for users to accidentally try to connect to tailscale.com instead of your headscale instance. If you have the ability to deploy MDM profiles (mac) or windows registry tweaks this is easy to fix, and the headscale server will even generate the configs for you.

- The headscale control plane doesn't support any kind of HA or replication. This doesn't disqualify it since tailscale can handle brief control plane outages without breaking the network, but it's likely to be a concern for serious enterprise users. It's possible to use an external Postgres database, so you can at least replicate data that way, but only one headscale server replica can be active at a time because they don't share runtime state.

- The tailscale API is not fully implemented, so you can't use things like the tailscale Kubernetes operator.

- Some features are missing: tailscale funnel, tailscale serve, app connectors, `autogroup:self` ACLs, SCIM provisioning, SSO group membership sync, and I forget what else. These may or may not be important to you.

For app connectors, I wrote an app to emulate the core functionality: https://github.com/singlestore-labs/tailscale-manager (it's in Haskell, but deployers don't need to care about that)

It's possible to implement group sync with some custom scripting - a python app to scrape your LDAP (or whatever) and generate tailscale ACLs isn't hard to write. But you do have to write it.

`autogroup:self` might be a big deal - you would need this if you want to stop users from seeing or connecting directly to each other's devices. I think there is an implementation of this coming in the next release of headscale.

Summary: headscale is great if you have relatively simple needs and can't afford to pay for Tailscale. You will probably outgrow it if you're running a serious business and need to comply with fancy audit requirements.

voxadam

10 months ago

Does it run on Plan 9?

bradfitz

10 months ago

Ha! But seriously, it's written in Go, so probably.

pilif

10 months ago

Keep in mind that for many use cases (mobile access, GUI on macOS), this relies on the official Tailscale clients keeping the ability to set the control server.

The moment the inevitable enshitification will start at Tailscale, this feature will go away.

I’m saying this as a currently super happy Tailscale customer who was burned multiple times in the past by other companies being sold or running out of VC money

risho

10 months ago

arent most of the the tailscale clients open source aside from the gui portion of the non open source os's?

pilif

10 months ago

Yes they are, unless you're using a mainstream OS and/or want to use a GUI, which is probably the most common use case.

__float

10 months ago

While the GUI is somewhat helpful, at the end of the day it's not the key piece, and it could easily be rebuilt.

notpushkin

10 months ago

I think the whole Windows client is closed. On macOS though you can use it from the command line just fine (apart from a couple quirks due to a completely different VPN implementation [1]).

[1]: they have three: https://tailscale.com/kb/1065/macos-variants

squiggleblaz

10 months ago

From https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale

"This repository contains the majority of Tailscale's open source code. Notably, it includes the tailscaled daemon and the tailscale CLI tool. The tailscaled daemon runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and to varying degrees on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The Tailscale iOS and Android apps use this repo's code, but this repo doesn't contain the mobile GUI code."

and

"The macOS, iOS, and Windows clients use the code in this repository but additionally include small GUI wrappers. The GUI wrappers on non-open source platforms are themselves not open source."

Moreover, there's https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-chocolatey to aid the build process. I haven't built it or run it.

On the other hand, while I suppose the Windows app is probably reasonably straightforward to replicate, I guess it would be much harder to produce an iOS or Android app because of the vagaries of mobile programming.

pilif

10 months ago

> I guess it would be much harder to produce an iOS or Android app because of the vagaries of mobile programming.

on iOS you also need a special entitlement that's only available on specific request and only to known developers, so practically impossible for any open source project to acquire.

dcow

10 months ago

This was true in 2015. It is not true anymore.

notpushkin

10 months ago

Thanks, I stand corrected then!

Android client is open source (and you can get in from F-Droid, even), so that only leaves iOS I guess.

freedomben

10 months ago

Yep, Tailscale takes a pretty reasonable approach to that IMHO. Open source on platforms that are open source. I think that works out pretty well because it meets people where they are. For example the people who care about open source (and thus are running linux or android) get their open source needs met, and people who don't care about open source strongly or at all (as evidenced in part by them running closed/proprietary OSes) such as mac or windows users are also met where they are. Of course this also helps protect their business model because then competitors can't just take the open source versions and run off with them, and the number of linux users is quite small compared to mac and windows so it keeps the majority of the client closed while still providing the openness to those who truly care about it.

*In my perfect world everybody would care about open source, but the evidence is pretty clear that only a tiny minority of people actually do, even among engineers

miki123211

10 months ago

I may be misremembering, but I think they have said somewhere that Headscale is actually revenue positive for them.

That feels right to me. Headscale is mostly used by home labbers and small hobby users, it competes with self-hosted OpenVPN and WireGuard, not Pulsesecure, Cisco Anyconnect or GlobalProtect. It's a way to introduce Tailscale to people who love to try new shiny tech in their spare time, but don't want to give up control over their infrastructure.

Those people will then bring their Tailscale expertise and enthusiasm to work. Work really doesn't like managing IT infrastructure unless it's one of their core competencies.

Sure, some companies will actually choose Headscale over Tailscale proper, but I suspect that's a small minority (especially if you take company size and the money involved into account). That's just cost of revenue, not unlike Facebook advertising or billboards on the side of a road in Silicon Valley.

comex

10 months ago

> I think they have said somewhere that Headscale is actually revenue positive for them.

I have the same memory. But they may not feel that way forever. Many a company started by attracting developers with a generous free tier or open-source offering, then started to clamp down once the going got tough.

Heck, it happened to one of Tailscale's competitors, ZeroTier, which used to release their client software under GPLv3 but eventually switched to BSL.

sixothree

10 months ago

Tailscale clients are the thing I am least happy about with Tailscale. Specifically mobile clients and battery usage.

The reason I can't use Tailscale at work is because it routes traffic through servers we can't control.

I would _love_ to use tailscale at work. It would solve so many problems. I am okay with being forced to open ports. But tunneling traffic through them is extremely worrysome.

pilif

10 months ago

> Specifically mobile clients and battery usage.

yes. Battery usage is super bad, mainly because of their DNS features which forces every DNS resolution to go through their network extension. At least recent updates have stopped the background power usage when you disconnect from the network in the app.

>But tunneling traffic through them is extremely worrysome.

it only does that in case of super bad NATs that make the usual NAT traversal techniques impossible. And presumably, the traffic is end-to-end-encrypted, so it doesn't matter if they have to be in the loop.

If you don't trust them to properly end-to-end encrypt, then it really doesn't matter whether they are in the loop for forwarding a packet or not because if you don't trust them to encrypt properly, all bets are off to begin with.

If you trust them however, it doesn't matter where the traffic is flowing through because only the intended machine is able to decrypt it.

dcow

10 months ago

On the battery topic I’m curious if you have anything more than anecdotal evidence. A basic full tunnel wg network extension doesn’t affect battery in a noticeable or unacceptable way, in my experience. Is tailscale’s implementation doing more in a way you can isolate and attribute to poor battery?

sixothree

10 months ago

I can see it (tailscale) in my battery usage on multiple devices. 20 hours of background usage per day is a bit much if you ask me.

CharlesW

10 months ago

FWIW: On iOS 18.4 my Battery report for the last 10 days is ~128h of background activity, using ~2% of my battery life.

pilif

10 months ago

Tailscale on my iPhone is unusable while connected in the background. The battery consumption reporting diagram is all 100% filled light blue bars, all attributed to Tailscale.

I’m using their MagicDNS feature with three domains and I think that’s the reason

3abiton

10 months ago

This looks interesting! What's the added value over wireguard + openwrt setup?

watusername

10 months ago

Your devices will connect to each other peer-to-peer (even behind complex NATs) with no manual configuration, subject to ACLs you centrally manage. It just works.

People sometimes dismiss Tailscale as "just" a WireGuard orchestrator, but it's actually much more than that - From a product perspective, WireGuard is just an implementation detail.

compootr

10 months ago

it's wireguard that doesn't make me hate myself :)

usagisushi

10 months ago

It's a mesh VPN, so peers communicate directly without additional delay.

I opted for Netbird myself because Headscale's UI felt too basic for me back then. Has that improved over the years probably?

udev4096

10 months ago

How is netbird? Is it more stable than tailscale/headscale? How is your performance while streaming a video?

usagisushi

10 months ago

They are both based on WireGuard (kernel-space and user-space `wireguard-go`), so I guess there's no significant difference in performance for typical usage.

In terms of stability, Netbird has been pretty good for me. I've been using Netbird as the backhaul network for my laptop, phone and inter-site k3s cluster for several years without major issues.

One major downside of Netbird is that its Android client can be quite a battery drainer [1]. (It keeps your fingers warm during winter, though!) As for Tailscale, it offers some neat features like Funnel, which is missing in Netbird, but in my case, covered by DNS and k8s Ingress.

[1]: https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/pull/3379

avtar

10 months ago

Netbird seems (or perhaps is?) newer. It didn't have some basic features baked in when I last looked into it, e.g. you couldn't switch accounts on the client https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/3273 and if I had an account associated with a single team, then that account couldn't be invited to or be associated with additional teams.

alabastervlog

10 months ago

Tailscale's value prop is "Wireguard that the merely somewhat-technically-inclined can set up and manage unassisted". Across tons and tons of clients (my AppleTVs connect to my Tailscale network, this took maybe a minute to configure—and they can act as gateways)

sunshine-o

10 months ago

Some do not want/have a fixed IP address or anything listening on their home network.

Tailscale or having Headscale hosted somewhere else allows you to do that.

user

10 months ago

[deleted]

aborsy

10 months ago

How much is the risk of my devices being compromised if Tailscale coordination server is compromised, and tailnet lock is enabled?

1vuio0pswjnm7

10 months ago

"To me, not giving your Tailscale implementation any way for the user to understand or veto what the control server is instructing the clients to do while also not auditing your servers code at all sure seems daring..."

This statement sugggests that publishing the Headscale control server source code is not enough to allow the user to "understand or veto what the control server is instructing the clients to do".

If using the Headscale control server, the user can "understand or veto" anything "the control server is instructing the clients to do". This may be accomplished by reading, editing and compiling the source code.

If using the Tailscale control server, the user can only "understand or veto what the control server is instruction the clients to do" to the extent that the Tailscale company permits. The user is prohibited from editing or compiling the source code.

Not all users want the option to read, edit and compile third party software that they use. Some users may be comfortable relying on the ongoing assurances of companies funded by Silicon Valley VC. For those users that want the option of 100% open source projects, not dependent on venture capital, Headscale can be useful.

The author of Headscale calls the Tailscale coordination server "essentially a shared dropbox for public keys".

udev4096

10 months ago

How does headscale hold up when you're streaming video over jellyfin/plex?

scottyeager

10 months ago

Do you mean when using it as a relay because p2p connectivity isn't possible? The preferred operating mode of Tailscale networks is for the bulk of traffic to go p2p, using various tricks for NAT and firewall traversal.

cassianoleal

10 months ago

I’ve used it extensively to stream video across continents. No issues as long as you can get a P2P connection going. If it needs to go through a DERP server, then it may suffer but in my experience that’s pretty rare.

watusername

10 months ago

> If it needs to go through a DERP server, then it may suffer but in my experience that’s pretty rare.

It's semi-frequent in my case, and it's painful every time it does that since Tailscale's official DERP servers are very slow (they seem to have some aggressive QoS). It would be nice if Tailscale supported using regular TURN servers so I could just use one of the hosted solutions.

cassianoleal

10 months ago

You can self-host DERP if you're up for it.

LilBytes

10 months ago

Yep and most of us are already using Subnet routers it's not technically much harder.

Finding a cloud or VPS provider with free or cheap bandwidth (egress and ingress) is likely the biggest issue.

pluto_modadic

10 months ago

wonder if some of the bugs with self-managing it have been worked out :)