I’ve been trying to figure out what purpose Pangolin serves in this. Do they offer a paid service that has the internet-accessible entry/exit point that I’m not seeing?
Self-hosters aren’t lacking in tools to connect between a home server and some internet exposed server so they can tunnel from that public internet server back to their home server, they’re lacking in affordable options for the internet accessible server itself. Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel, and similar can easily be trivially replaced by a simple Wireguard connection from your home server to a public VPS with a couple trivial routing rules. But you have to have an affordable VPS with reasonable bandwidth and high reliability. Pangolin appears to just be Tailscale-ike permission-based routing software, but without the actual connections tools or hosting. That’s already available for free with Headscale, but Headscale also includes the connections part too. Am I missing something that would make Pangolin even equivalent, let alone better than, the free Headscale project?
I see, so Pangolin includes the Tailscale Funnel functionality (which Headscale currently does not), integrates Authentik and Traefik, and sells it as a stand alone service. I guess there’s probably a narrow market for that, though it’s unlikely to be self-hosting. My experience is that any OAuth or RBAC solution is too involved and/or poorly supported by self-hosted applications to see more than a small number self-hosters using it, and those that do are advanced enough users that they would probably just build it themselves with free tools instead.