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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • With Tailscale and other mesh VPN, by default all your machines are client and servers. If you have 3 machines A, B and C, when machine A wants to send something to B it will connect to the server that B has.

    These mesh VPN have a central server that is used to help with the discovery of the members, manage ACLs, and in the case one machine is quite hidden and not direct network access can be done act as a relay. Only in that last case do the traffic go through the central server, otherwise the only thing the central server knows is that machine A requested to talk to machine B.

    You still have to trust them if you want to use their server, but you can also host your own server (headscale for Tailscale). Though at this point you still need to somewhat trust Tailscale anyway since they re the ones doing the client releases. They could absolutely insert a backdoor and it would work for a while until is is discovered and would then totally ruin their reputation.



  • If you are in an enterprise environment, it is easier to sell Ubuntu - at least there is a company that can provide support for it behind. Companies want to make sure someone is on the hook to fix an issue that would be blocking to them, and this is much harder with something like Debian.

    That’s why Red Hat is used that much in companies, and what Canonical main revenues are coming from.

    But as a selfhoster, I use Debian by default for my servers. Only if there is a very specific need for Ubuntu would I switch, and I am frankly tired of the Snap shenanigans on my desktop (thinking of migrating to PopOS or KDE Neon).







  • I’ll provide an ELI5, though if you actually want to use it you’ll have to go beyond ELI5.

    You contact a web service via a combination of IP address and port. For the sake of simplicity, we can assume that domain name is equivalent to IP address. You can then compare domain name/port with street name/street number: you need both to actually find someone. By default, some street numbers are really standard, like 443 is for regular encrypted connection. But you can have any service on any street number, it’s just less nice and less standard. This is usually done on closed networks.

    Now what happens if you have a lot of services and you want all of them reachable at address 443? Well basically you are now in the same situation as a business building with a lobby. Whenever you want to contact a service, you go to 443, ask the reception what floor they are in, and they will direct you there. The reception desk is your proxy: just making sure you talk to the right people.