Not sure about the parent, but here's what I use it for:

- easy access my other, older machines from my phone or work laptop to:

- self-host a Coolify server (a "vercel-lite" control panel)

- remote connect to my older laptop to run tests/longer coding tasks for work (e.g. large browser test suites, sandboxed claude running in bg to answer longer code questions, or build fire and forget spikes/experiments)

- control my home cinema remotely (remote+ app bc it's easy and Remote Desktop).

- use w. Mullvad VPN as an exit note (Tailscale has a really easy UI for it nowadays)

- use it like ngrok to expose my dev servers to the internet (e.g. when sharing a quick demo/pairing with a coworker)

- cheap NAS - I the old mac is connected to an external HD (the HD itself is archived to Hetzner)

I haven't (yet) tested it as an alternative to Hamachi (is it still a thing?) but I'm planing a LAN party with my brothers who live across the continent.

Like you, I also didn't know what the fuss was about and I'm generally cautious not to get sidetracked.

I have some servers sending their telegraf data to a server in my home using the tailnet instead of opening a port on my firewall for that, to name one use case.

It has a pretty good ACL functionality, you can configure which hosts with certain tag can access certain routes.

https://headscale.net/stable/about/faq/#scaling-how-many-cli...

> Scaling / How many clients does Headscale support? > It depends. As often stated, Headscale is not enterprise software and our focus is homelabbers and self-hosters. Of course, we do not prevent people from using it in a commercial/professional setting and often get questions about scaling. > Please note that when Headscale is developed, performance is not part of the consideration as the main audience is considered to be users with a modest amount of devices. We focus on correctness and feature parity with Tailscale SaaS over time. [...] > Headscale calculates a map of all nodes that need to talk to each other, creating this "world map" requires a lot of CPU time. When an event that requires changes to this map happens, the whole "world" is recalculated, and a new "world map" is created for every node in the network. [...] > Headscale will start to struggle when [there are] e.g. many nodes with frequent changes will cause the resource usage to remain constantly high. In the worst case scenario, the queue of nodes waiting for their map will grow to a point where Headscale never will be able to catch up, and nodes will never learn about the current state of the world.

I find that quite interesting and it is one of the reasons I've not really considered trying out Headscale myself.

I dont understand what these two have to do with anything? The db-use is almost trivial, and SQLite can be embedded. Why would we want wasted effort and configuration complexity on supporting postgres?

Tailscale itself only uses sqlite[1], so I’m not sure if that really holds in this case.

[1]: https://tailscale.com/blog/database-for-2022

[dead]

Yeah, Headscale people don't hide that it's a toy. I didn't get a homelab full of datacentre-grade equipment because I want to use toy, nonscaling solutions with vastly incomplete feature sets, but for the exact opposite reason.

On a different note; the HN obsession with SQLite these days is getting a bit tiresome.

No, it's only viable if your whole network is, like, five devices.