I am using Tailscale (TS) to connect two networks to transmit, every night, backup data to an offsite machine. TS does a great job, both networks can operate with no public, open ports and speed is great. But… sometimes I don’t get a direct connection and run in DERP or Relay mode. In my case this is significantly slower, by a factor of 7 to 1.
I find if I persist and use lots of retries, like tailscale ping --c 100 <node> I can get a direct connection. I am thinking to run a script repeatedly to perform this to ensure that when it’s time for backup the connection will be direct.
My question is:
How long does the connection stay up without any activity? 60 seconds? 5 minutes? 60 minutes? If I know I can plan my keep alive job to repeat before I loose the connection.