Tag: Tailscale

  • Tailscale killed my DNS

    I am working on a remote location today, on a shared venue network.

    After rebooting my Mac I could no longer connect to any website domain, which led me to believe that DNs was not resolving. And indeed, pinging www.google.com gave no results. Even when tethered to my iPhone, I could not connect to any website. Connecting to VPN by IP did work though, and pinging 8.8.8.8 worked fine as well.

    Luckily, I could search for clues on my phone, and ran into this command that I have not used before:

    scutil --dns which gives you a nice list of DNS resolvers as they are used by the system, and, on top of that list this entry:

    resolver #1
      search domain[0] : tailf67a92.ts.net
      nameserver[0] : 100.100.100.100
      if_index : 24 (utun4)
      flags    : Supplemental, Request A records, Request AAAA records
      reach    : 0x00000003 (Reachable,Transient Connection)
      order    : 102000

    I restarted Tailscale, and we are online again 🎉.

  • From Hamachi in 2004 to Tailscale 20 years later

    Back in 2004, Alex Pankratov launched Hamachi, a new and fresh approach to VPN. It was so easy to use, compared to classic VPN. I really enjoyed using it, trying to maintain access to different systems at home, work, parents, …

    Hamachi, by Alex Pankratov

    After moving to a single, portable, computer I did no longer have the need for a solution like Hamachi. And LogMeIn’s acquisition of the company made it feel more corporate, less indie. I lost track of it.

    Today, I’m in a similar spot for a project, and slowly these memories came back. Instead of Hamachi, I now use Tailscale, who seem to have a good (free) offering for personal and small usage.

    PS: funny how small this world is, cause only yesterday I was looking at nullboard, another project by Alex Pankratov, that was on the frontpage of the orange website. I had no idea this was by the same developer!