I’m currently on a 16 day Japan tour. Right now it is pouring rain all over the country. Wave after wave of thick sheets of rain covering everything, making sight seeing prohibitive, even for the most adventurous.
Thanks to Tailscale, an Exit Node set up in my home, and YouTube TV, I’m watching the critical Game 3 of the Lakers / Warriors NBA Playoff series. The Kagoshima mountains (and other hotels) are in the background. A bag of Soy Sauce flavored potato chips rounds out the experience.
These are the moments you pat yourself on the back for being a Home Networking Nerd. It’s just such a powerful and fulfilling feeling to leverage your carefully constructed network to provide for you when you really need it, even when you’re an ocean apart.
Legit question - what does tailscale get you that a regular vpn into yiur home network doesn’t?
I’ve looked at it before, and I can see how it’d make sense to mesh disparate locations and networks into one shared one, but can’t see what it gets me for such a simple setup.
I know Tailscale is just a VPN, but I feel the same way. It’s truly magical and dead simple to set up. Whether I’m in the office or elsewhere, my home server is accessible. And I can do backups of my laptop from anywhere even
And then I’ve also got a VPS set up with Grafana and such, and it’s in the same VPN, so there is no need to expose it publicly. Magical
So you are streaming video from another continent through the connection, and it is fast enough not to be throttled? I am curious because I use a lot of remote desktop applications, but they don’t work well for watching video through the connection, usually.
It’s just such a powerful and fulfilling feeling to leverage your carefully constructed network to provide for you when you really need it, even when you’re an ocean apart.
Except Tailscale is the easiest mesh VPN to get up and running. One command to install and the other to activate.
Not to diminish Tailscale any but you can also look into Twingate which is sort of a Zero trust platform version of Tailscale just as simple to setup. I have Tailscale on my PfSense router and Twingate on my Unraid server. Only difference I could tell was the granularity with Twingate also not an affiliate just happen to come across TG this morning. Also Twingate isn’t a VPN.
Is that an iPad? I ask because I’ve used VPN w/ YTTV, and I thought it used the GPS from the device, not the IP address… no? My experience is that it works on my laptop, but not the iPad, when I’m VPN’d internationally.
Tailscale is dead simple to set up. That’s a major thing going for it. But here’s some of the other really cool things you can easily do:
Use Tailscale to access multiple different networks. Basically, each host can advertise routes to their own networks, which is like being connected to two different networks at the same time.
Have multiple different exit nodes. Switching your location is just a dropdown away. Yes, major VPN providers have this, but for a DIY-ish system it’s pretty nice.
Share nodes with friends. This was the biggie for me - I’ve got a friend with a Synology NAS and we both shared our Synologys to each other and use it for another remote backup options.
Very fine grained access control. This is a bit of a black art with Tailscale still, but you can easily use it say “device X can’t talk to devices in group Y” etc. From an enterprise perspective this is pretty huge. If you’re the kind of person who likes segmenting your VLANs, definitely check that out.
Work just about anywhere. Dunkin’s wifi usually blocks my Wireguard VPN, but Tailscale just works.
One of the most handy things I do with Tailscale is that I’ve installed it on a little GL.iNet travel router. Whenever I get where I’m going, I just plug that router in, and all my devices treat the network like we’re home still. Yeah, you could probably do that with any old VPN, but it’s fun nonetheless.
it just makes it a whole lot easier, especially if you are behind CGNAT or other complicating network setups where a traditional VPN prove difficult to get working. you also get pretty simple ACLs and some other functionality which are easy to roll out versus going in the weeds at the command prompt on a traditional setup - if you even know how to do it. Tailscale is pretty sweet. the trade-off is that you lose some performance (quite a bit depending on situation) but most people are happy to do that for the ease-of-use and configuration and the ability to say “it just works”
Tailscale is just a fancy frontend for wireguard that makes getting set up much simpler.
Their implementation is slick and very clean.
I prefer setting up my own wireguard servers, but for someone who doesn’t care about knowing the technical details about how to do so, Tailscale is an easy way to get going.
It does UDP hole punching too, which might not mean anything to you, but it essentially facilitates direct connections between your endpoints if possible, instead of going through a relay host. That can speed up traffic between hosts in the VPN. If you type “tailscale status” you can see that sometimes it says “direct” and sometimes it says “relay”. If it says “direct” that means the hole punching was successful.
Would like to try that! 