![]() ![]() You can even use node sharing to give people access to individual services (such as your Minecraft or Plex server) without having to give them access to your whole tailnet. If you’re not in the same email domain or GitHub organization, you can’t get in. No more having to track down someone’s machines or having to maintain spreadsheets of IP addresses-to-person mappings. As a side effect, you can remove someone’s access from the tailnet and all of their machines will go with it. Tailscale solves these issues by making a link between membership in the tailnet and human identities, validated by your identity provider. What if friendships sour and previously friendly contact turns into vitriol and anger? How can you block someone quickly if they become a threat? What if their machine gets infected and you want to prevent the spread of ransomware? A low-permissions model is great for most issues, but when things go bad it can make you regret doing it like that. This is not as fine when it comes to taking Hamachi into the office, though. Pedantically, this is fine for individuals. You had no way of knowing who anyone was without asking them directly through an external communications channel. There was no identity challenge with an identity provider. You had to eject each of their devices one at a time.Īt the time I used it, access to Hamachi networks was also controlled by knowing the network number. You couldn’t eject every machine someone owned at once. ![]() The only way to limit someone’s access to machines on the network was to eject all of their machines from it. There was no way to limit or cordon off the scope of someone’s permissions. ![]() Horrifically, when someone was on your Hamachi network, they had effectively all the same permissions as being on your local LAN or Wi-Fi connection. There was no strict identity associated with each node on a Hamachi network. Hamachi focused on connectivity and left the rest up to the users. Peeling back the nostalgiaĪt some level, you can think about Tailscale as an idealized form of what Hamachi could have been if they hadn’t stopped at the network connection level. My Twitter audience is a minute subset of the audience that Tailscale in general is targeting (ideally we want Tailscale to pioneer intra-galactic networking or something like that), but I was able to confirm my suspicion that the respondents to the survey who used Hamachi in the past mostly used it for playing games with people. The poll was also filtered through selection bias due to the fact that I only had it open for 24 hours on a Monday. My audience on Twitter skews toward “tech bros,” gender minorities, gamers, and other such groups of people. In the process of writing this article, I made an informal Twitter poll. Tailscale transforms the ideas of Hamachi in ways that take it from being another mesh VPN to being a fundamental building block that your friends, family, co-workers, and external contractors can use in order to build the next generation of shared game worlds, internal applications, and more as we transition toward an interplanetary civilization. I’ve been working at Tailscale for almost two years, and after deep diving into Tailscale in a billionty different aspects, I think that Tailscale is not just Hamachi v2, it’s an evolution beyond the concepts Hamachi brought to the table. Hi! I’m the cartoon shark that normally appears on Xe’s blog, but I’ll be along for the ride to introduce additional side context. ![]() Things faded naturally as people graduated, but Hamachi continued to be one of the most useful pieces of software I had ever used. My friends and I were able to play games for all the years I was in college. There was firewall hole punching, as well as an array of relay servers as a fallback. You got your own IP address and could discover your friends’ computers using the app. With Hamachi, you had a network number and you shared that with your friends in order to join your machines together. This allowed us to be together even on breaks, when we were on opposite sides of the state. We shared our photos, code creations, and more all over that shared network. While I was there, I got introduced to a tool called Hamachi that we used in order to keep playing games like Minecraft, StarCraft (Brood War), and Age of Mythology together over winter and summer breaks. It was full of nerds, and we had file shares and LAN parties every weekend. It was quite possibly one of the most interesting places I’ve ever lived. When I was in college almost a decade ago, I lived on the computer science floor of my dorm. ![]()
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