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its not really that hard to setup amazon system manager. like maybe 2-3 hours of overhead.

the idea that you'd pay a subscription fee greater than aws just to avoid a few hours of learning how to set something up is kinda disgusting in comparison.



Resolving to a hostname in n AWS using a tag is eirksome though. MagicDNS on the other hand in Tailscale makes it easier.

FWIW I use both SSM Port Forwarding and Tailscale but Tailscale is easier for both tech and non-tech users IMO.


I wrote a ruby script that does tag lookup for me with an interactive prompt. Took about an hour. Sent it to my team so we all use it. Can't imagine subscribing to a service for something that is a minor devops task.


I’m going to be that guy at point you in the direction of “that comment” on Dropbox

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863


This was my comment re. AWS SSM and Tailscale just a few days ago.

'Installing the agent client side is no more or less tedious than installing the Tailscale client, IMO anyway.

I made two scripts, one in .Net with a GUI for non-devs to grep a server hostname or tag:name in AWS that resolves to an instance ID for SSH or RDP. And another python script doing the same but without the GUI for the dev team. Works a treat.

But you've already explained why it's a little tedious and now I've documented and understood why. Tailscale MagicDNS does all this nonsense for you. Yeah ok thanks for rubber ducking me I see your point now. :)'


I might be misremembering this, but IIRC if your nodes are running on latest Amazon Linux, they already have the ssm-agent pre-installed.

At most you'd need to add some permissions to the instance's role, maybe.


How many devices do you need to keep connected? I'm surprised the free tier wouldn't work for you to be honest


Huh? Why would I use a paid third party service (free tier or not) for something that I know how to use at no additional cost?


Why do you care what other people do? Just focus on yourself.


[flagged]


I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but it appears that you're calling them lazy.

Whereas they're saying that spending time setting up AWS is complicated (for them) and not worth their own personal effort in comparison.


And I'm suggesting that spending money on a subscription fee for something that could be learned within a few hours is not worth it in comparison.

I'm not sure where you read the ad-hominem.


I didn’t downvote you but the issue is definitely your phrasing (“disgusting”).

It took me all of 3 seconds to fall in love with Tailscale, but I think I agree with your point. This is a place of knowledge and curiosity, so digging into stuff and setting it up yourself is definitely to be commended.

For me, I just want a solution that works and I simply don’t have the cycles to spend on this specific problem. Happy to outsource, nothing disgusting about that.




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