Founders and CEOs on Reddit

Avery Pennarun

Co-founder and CEO of Tailscale

How we know it's theirs

"Tailscalar" flair from r/Tailscale's moderators, who flair Tailscale staff

We retrieved 3 posts and 21 comments from u/apenwarr, dated 2011 to 2026, most often in r/Tailscale, r/programming and r/PleX.

Best moment

A redditor posted in r/Tailscale

Any plans for affordable family plan ?

Hi 👋 I’ve been using Tailscale since a few months now and have been absolutely loving it since the start. However I fear I won’t be able to afford it anymore when you guys are going to enforce plans limitation. I’m absolutely willing to pay for it but I’m not ready to pay 10$…

u/apenwarr replied

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[tailscale employee here] Yeah, we realize our pricing for friends-and-family use is pretty wrong. It's not that we're so bad at pricing, but rather that the software core doesn't make collaboration very easy yet, so we can't launch the plans we want. A flawed temporary workaround for this is to share a single login between multiple people's devices. ACLs also work in the Solo plan we we intend to continue allowing that.

Stay tuned for something that makes a lot more sense. Our goal was never to try to extract tons of profit from home users. We just don't have a family-friendly underlying domain model working yet. Working on it!

More moments

A redditor posted in r/Tailscale

hello.ipn.dev security

Hi, just joined and authorized two devices. Then in the admin panel I notice there's a third one - hello.ipn.dev. That was a little bit disconcerting, and surprising. I disabled it. I know its and IRC server, but why would You have it there by default? This gives tailscale…

u/apenwarr replied

Actually the reason for the auto-added server on new network is to prevent a chicken-and-egg problem: after you install just one node, how do you know it's workng? If you install two nodes and they can't talk to each other…

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hello.ipn.dev helps with those questions, even if it's just a pingable server. But ping is hard to do on iOS or Android, and even on other OSes it requires people to drop to the command line, which can be tough, so we added an https server you can visit from a browser. And then we had to make the https server respond with something, so we added a (go-based) irc server kind of as a joke. (You can also connect using a regular irc client, which is another important test: most BeyondCorp-style products cannot proxy non-http traffic like irc.) More on testing with hello.ipn.dev here: https://tailscale.com/kb/1030/next-steps

The irc server seems to have gotten misconstrued as a tech support mechanism lately, which isn't ideal (since we're a small team and can't monitor it full time), so we'll probably aim to shut it down and redirect people to freenode. But on the other hand, some users like it so we're hesitant to shut it down.

Anyway, other commenters are correct that it's ACLed to not allow outgoing connections; it makes a good demo of a "one way" node. Nevertheless, users who are concerned about keeping their network private should remove the test node from their network, as described here: https://tailscale.com/kb/1073/hello-ipn-dev

-- Avery@Tailscale

A redditor posted in r/Tailscale

Tailscale is down?

Tailscale seems to be down, as I'm unable to connect right now and even the web domain is down per downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Is this a regular happening? Fortunately my application is just for personal use and it's not too big a deal, but curious about whether this service…

u/apenwarr replied

Hmm, we aren't aware of any reason tailscale.com should have appeared down earlier today. We had one downtime incident for about an hour last weekend (our first! Postmortem coming soon). The reliability is generally pretty high. One thing we're proud…

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One thing we're proud of in the tailscale architecture is even if our public web site and login servers have outages, your network itself should keep being able to communicate, because the data is exchanged point-to-point. (The only part that wouldn't work during server downtime is adding new nodes, changing permissions, etc.) Obviously this doesn't excuse server downtime, but it's nice to have multiple layers of protection.