Tried tailscale/tailcat: A Small Tool with Big Private-Network Potential
tailscale/tailcat is essentially netcat over Tailscale’s data plane—without depending on Tailscale’s control plane. That makes it interesting for teams building private AI infrastructure: you can move TCP traffic between trusted nodes without exposing an inference gateway publicly or introducing another VPN control dependency.
The project is currently seeing strong momentum, with +790 GitHub stars today. The appeal is easy to understand: it is small, composable, and fits the way infrastructure engineers already think about nc, port forwarding, and service probes.
A practical architecture is to keep the AI gateway on a private Docker network, then expose only the required listener through Tailcat:
# docker-compose.yml
