I use Pangolin for exposing my self-hosted services publicly and Tailscale for private external access. Both work as expected. While I was setting up Headscale as a self-hosted alternative to Tailscale’s cloud control server, I ran a few ping tests between devices on my home LAN. Surprisingly, some replied at 5-19ms (direct), others at 88-102ms (relayed through Tailscale’s DERP). That made me wonder why traffic was detouring when both devices were on the same network. A few days ago, I was going through Pangolin’s changelogs, and the latest 1.21 update claimed to support same-network detection. That one line in the changelog made me ask myself: does this feature actually deliver what Tailscale couldn’t? But the honest answer to this question took more digging than I expected.