GoKawiil"Tailscale without Tailscale, by Tailscale"
Tailcat
Tailcat is a remix of Tailscale open source pieces to act like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane, without Tailscale's control plane. Tailscale's data plane ( magicsock , internally) gives you point-to-point WireGuard®-encrypted tunnels between two machines with DERP as the NAT-hole-punching communication side channel and the ultimate relay-of-last-resort if NAT traversal fails. Instead of using the Tailscale control plane, all tailcat connection metadata is exchanged out of band, however you want.
The tailcat CLI (in cmd/tailcat ) is built on the tailcat Go library (importable as github.com/tailscale/tailcat ).
Whether you use tailcat as a CLI tool or library, one side runs a tailcat server (listener) and gets back a short connection token. The other side passes that token to tailcat 's client side to connect. All traffic between the two is encrypted end-to-end with WireGuard. The initial connection bootstraps through a DERP server (see below), and then magicsock performs NAT traversal to upgrade to a direct peer-to-peer UDP connection when possible (usually!).
You don't need a Tailscale account, root/admin access on the machine (it doesn't alter your machine's routing tables, DNS, etc.). It's just a userspace library and CLI tool.
And it's all open source.
You can use our free rate-limited DERP relays (the default DERP map is https://tailcat.dev/derpmap.json) or you can run your own.
Install
$ go install github.com/tailscale/tailcat/cmd/tailcat@latest
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