Hello I’ve been using cloudflare to get remote access for the couple apps I selfhost, but lately I’ve been hearing about the wonders of tailscale.
It seems that the free tier is enough for my use. Which would be a safe option to have remote access for my 3D printer? Also how are both in terms of privacy?
I think you have a misunderstanding about wireguard clients.
As long as the server isn’t behind a cgnat, a connection from the client to the server can be made. It does not matter if the client is behind a cgnat or not. If that were true, privacy vpns like proton and mullvad would not work.
That said, tailscale is easy to setup compared to a wireguard tunnel, but wireguard has potentially more performance because tailscale uses wireguard-go rather than wireguard kernel.
I haven’t tried reversing it like that, but I was under the impression that there were no specific servers or clients in WireGuard land and that both devices had to connect to each other and authenticate.
I have never really thought about how the servers of VPN providers are supposed to work if this was the case.
I guess I just got confused when I tried setting it up someday.
I haven’t benchmarked it personally but apparently tailscale and WireGuard are very similar in performance due to optimization done by tailscale. I think they wanted to push the improvements upstream but I am not sure if that happened or if it’s still waiting.
I believe performance is situationally dependent, so it may or may not be faster, but it theoretically is. I personally choose wireguard over tailscale because it’s one less 3rd party involved, not for potential performance increases.
That’s fair. I use Wireguard somewhere else for the same reason.