Headscale creator here.

> Fun fact: Tailscale have an almost-assuredly-accurate count of Headscale users due to how few people disable the Tailscale client's telemetry which by default sends them real-time events about everything you do on a Headscale network. See KB1011: https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic

That is not true. We actually instruct all the clients to send no logs - since at least three years:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blame/main/hscontrol/t....

And also in the config example:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/main/config-examp...

That said, I would have loved to know how many nodes use Headscale... :)

> even though I understand that it is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days.

https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/

I was drawing attention to this line in your README:

> This project is not associated with Tailscale Inc.

:)

Ah, I was not stating anything else than linking their blog post :)

I am pretty sure they would have eventually published a control server.

We just happened to be quicker (and come up with a great name, IMHO).

Tailscale hired the guy who wrote Headscale, for him to work on software, so they're sponsoring the programmer who's working it, but it's not "Tailscale" software, and they have no warranty, express or implied, because it's not theirs. It's its own project.

Headscale dev here!

What issues did you face? :)

It was last year, so it's not in recent memory, but most of the problem was around instability. We ran into some frequent issues where we would begin troubleshooting, assuming it was something on the application end, only to find out that the issue was happening in the network. We eventually figured out that the Headscale network was randomly dropping in and out. I'm sure with a lot more time we could have identified the root cause, but unfortunately, we had a deadline and just paid Tailscale (and haven't had any issues since).

Like I said, I'm sure it's coming along fine, it's not just something that we were able to set and forget like with the Tailscale experience.

We have definitely improved a lot the stability and test coverage in the last year. Really, really a lot. Still a bit to go, but overall there have been many changes :)

But indeed we are not meant to replace the full frictionless experience of Tailscale SaaS.

Or they would not be supporting the development of Headscale.

Yes?

And it's fully supported by Headscale.

It was the only possible one really.

Headscale dev here.

Companies looking into this will pay Tailscale.com service. You really need commercial support if you plan a large enterprise deployment. Tailscale even now offers a self-hosted version of their service - for those with concerns about using the public SaaS.

We do have support for separate namespaces/tailnets, and we will be adding ACLs soon...

PRs welcome :)

Yup.

Btw, there is no IdP support in Headscale. You need to have access to the machine where you are running it, and use the CLI to register your machines (or use a authkey, ofc).