Any plan on adding internet access without Tailscale?
Hi there ! Do you plan on adding internet access without the need to install Tailscale etc, that would be a really cool feature :D
8 Replies
Tailscale is the best solution that is possible at the moment. We cannot simply provide a relay proxy since that would be open to abuse. To operate a relay ourselves we would need to manage user accounts, billing etc, effectively becoming a VPN provider.
We wrote at length about the choice of using Tailscale here: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with-networking-via-tailscale
Thank you for your answer ! I read the article, my question was more about using the browser directly without relying on a proxy but sounds like its not possible, thank you for your answer ! :D
https://wicg.github.io/direct-sockets/ looks like something is currtly being implemented in Chrome but I guess its gonna take a long time before it's in prod
When something like that becomes available we will certainly use it, but it should be noted that similar attempts at standardization in the past have failed. There are some thorny security issues which are difficult to solve.
Just started poking around with this (super cool! much more accessible than JSLinux 😬 ), is it currently possible to provide user feedback via stderr when Tailscale networking isn't connected? Rather than waiting for a timeout on something like
curl https://canihazip.comNot via stderr, that's controlled by the x86 process which is only aware of failures on socket syscalls. It cannot have knowledge about Tailscale
You should be able to provide feedback at the integration level. Currently we show the IP on WebVM only when tailscale is connected for example.
Maybe you are referring to another case, namely when an exit node is not properly configured?
Not possible at all or would require customization that's not really possible from me currently? Overall this is an area of CS that I'm pretty unfamiliar with so forgive my ignorance in advance 😅
If it's possible to detect that the exit node is improperly configured, that would be good too! But I was mainly just imagining that it might be more intuitive for someone interacting with WebVM for the first time (who wouldn't be aware of the network limitations, or be familiar with the requirement to login to Tailscale, or--if applicable here--that previous Tailscale auth has expired) to receive a terminal prompt to login to Tailscale. I suppose I was wondering whether there was any sort of exposed interface to hook into syscalls to facilitate that (if it even makes sense).
Not possible at all or would require customization that's not really possible from me currently?Not possible in general. It's equivalent to getting "<Provider> fiber has been cut by a ship in the north sea" on stderr I think the problem is much simpler anyway, the syscall should not wait for timeout if tailscale is not connected, since there is obviously no route. I'll mark this bug down in the internal bug tracker
You can write an internet thing yourself
JSLinux is real QEMU and can run everything
And has all syscalls