Or Netbird, both work very well and Netbird can be completely self hosted; Tailscale requires Headscale AFAIK.

Yah, left in 2024.

In DNS and all Unix style host resolution generally (documentation on the file /etc/resolv.conf details this), all clients have a domain search list, usually set by your DHCP server, which for Google owned computers is obvs google.com, but it can be several domains.

All they need is to set up an A record for go.google.com (its more likely googleplex.com) which runs a link shortener/expander site, and their employees can use the shorthand form of go/linkname for it to be expanded for them in their browser.

They could also set an entry in every corporate computer’s local hosts file for ‘go’, and deploy it automatically using ansible, chef, etc. Or configure it in the company wide HTTP(S) proxy that all clients are configure to use. I forget now which method it is, and there are of course many other ways to do it than these.

Anyway go/linkname is a huge part of their culture as mentioned by the other commenter, and I was also triggered seeing it.

I have indeed seen that XO-CE script. But is it true that you have to delete and recreate the container, rather than just doing apt update? AFAIK XO_CE is just a debian VM.