Nothing personal against tailscale but I hope it drives the point home that leaving the hosting of the key exchange server for your mesh network to an external entity is a little bit ridiculous.
And for some specific somebody, fixing the problem is their whole job. It’s definitely not my whole job. Maybe not even my job at all (if it’s something I just use as part of a personal hobby.)
Cloud providers have enormous economic incentive to recover from outages as fast as possible and can bring many more people to help, often ones who wrote the code and designed the system. I once worked for a state government where the exchange server was down for two weeks.
I had to deal with a state Medicaid system that would go down often. If it crashed after 5pm, it was down until the next morning when someone rebooted the SunOS box. (Yes, they just rebooted the box, and no, in 2014 it was still sunos, not Solaris). Meanwhile, it’s messing up pharmacy authorization for thousand of elderly and low income people in the state ….
I ran my own Wireguard for years, but its too clunky and difficult to put all my devices on it. And if the power at my house goes out, the net is fully down. I suppose its a trade-off for using Tailscale now, with a great command line tool and a great UI so I have actually onboarded the rest of my family here. It was too much of a hassle with plain Wireguard nodes.
For me tailscale being down just means I can't access things I'm not comfortable exposing publicly outside my home. It isn't a huge deal as I rarely have that need.
with Tailscale Lock you have a lot more control, you can also self-host your coordinator server which is an alternative even mentioned in the service docs[0]
