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Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by plantinthebok on Sunday November 16, 2025 @02:52PM (#45947870)
What's the actual win here? Avoiding relay latency in the rare cases Tailscale can't punch through NAT? If that's it, a $3 VPS running Headscale seems simpler. The complexity feels like you're optimizing for the 5% case while adding permanent vendor lock in. What am I missing?
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by k_bx on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:21PM (#45948087)
$3 VPS running Headscale is not simpler since you won't be able to run both headscale and tailscale on your end user machines, I don't recommend it.

The solution we've found is running a white IP container (or VPS) which looks like regular Wireguard outside, while inside it "forwards" to your existing tailscale network.

I don't remember if we use https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker or https://github.com/juhovh/tailguard

Also see: https://tailscale.com/blog/peer-relays-beta

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by killingtime74 on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:12PM (#45948016)
For many homelabbers, just being cheap and avoiding the $3 VPS, that's it
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by comrh on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:20PM (#45948073)
I dont even pay anything, my tiny homelab is completely covered by the free tier
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by kohbo on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:02PM (#45948827)
What provider still has decent free tier?
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by antonkochubey on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:07PM (#45948862)
Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by Incipient on Sunday November 16, 2025 @06:29PM (#45949432)
That can't possibly be free?
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by renewiltord on Sunday November 16, 2025 @08:58PM (#45950239)
That’s generous but Oracle is very generous.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by jazzyjackson on Sunday November 16, 2025 @09:32PM (#45950383)
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Only caveat I see is they reserve the right to delete underutilized/ idling instances

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by siwatanejo on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:23AM (#45951516)
I guess they require a credit card before accessing that free tier?
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by ranguna on Monday November 17, 2025 @03:54PM (#45958161)
If they do: create a virtual one, create an account with it and delete the card right after.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by ranguna on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @03:53AM (#45977273)
An honest advise being down-voted?

Thanks

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by siwatanejo on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @10:17PM (#45988493)
I upvoted you.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by gear54rus on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:30PM (#45949062)
Which region were you able to create this in? They seem to be out of capacity all the time in EU.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by jnsaff2 on Monday November 17, 2025 @04:13AM (#45952032)
I have read that you need to write a script to constantly bombard their API in order to get one. I presume you'd be fighting other scripts.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by petronic on Monday November 17, 2025 @10:55AM (#45954711)
What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by Peacefulz on Monday November 17, 2025 @01:26PM (#45956373)
I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by elantile on Monday November 17, 2025 @05:43PM (#45959263)
It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.

The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by anon7000 on Sunday November 16, 2025 @09:06PM (#45950265)
Exactly, just today I set up a cloudflare tunnel to a docker compose service running on my home server. I didn’t want to expose the server directly to the internet, and I want to share this service on a certain domain with broader family.

I have a server at home that works well. I don’t reaaaally want to pay an extra $30-$40/yr and have an extra thing to manage when the CF tunnel works fine for free. I like Tailscale more, but I want to share this with family who won’t install TS and also want to use a specific domain.

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by throwaway678339 on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:09PM (#45947999)
I don't think you are missing anything. They have a bunch of half baked features like this that aren't as robust as real security vendors and lock you in just like you said.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by josteink on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:11PM (#45948012)
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something…

But are you accusing someone of promoting vendor lock-in (cloudflare) while at the same time promoting vendor lock-in (tailscale)?

If you’re ok with vendor lock-in, shouldn’t you in theory be ok with any vendor?

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by bingo-bongo on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:17PM (#45948054)
Headscale is the not-vendor-login version of Tailscale.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by uneekname on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:32AM (#45951560)
Sort of. Many tailscale clients you would use with headscale are closed source.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by fragmede on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:25PM (#45948103)
No. Not all vendors are equal. We can treat ProtonMail differently then Gmail, for example. Looking at what's gone down with VMware, definitely don't get in bed with Broadcom.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by zrail on Sunday November 16, 2025 @04:59PM (#45948806)
Tailscale has what they call Peer Relays now to help solve this problem:

https://tailscale.com/blog/peer-relays-beta

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by codethief on Monday November 17, 2025 @06:12AM (#45952600)
What does Headscale have to do with NAT hole punching? I believe what you actually mean is setting up a relay, see the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45948806 .