tailscale

12 July 2024

Today, I finally got around to setting up a Tailscale virtual network to access my machines remotely without leaving network ports exposed to the (evil) world.

We were going on a family holiday to a foreign country (Lanzarote, so technically Spain) and, as something of an experiment, I installed Plex at home to see if I could access it while I was away. However, this made me twitchy as I needed to open a port on my firewall to the public internet. Tailscale was one of those things I'd always meant to try but never got around to, so when we got back I closed the Plex port and spent a few hours setting up Tailscale instead. For next time, you see.

There's not much more to tell. The software installed easily and worked first time! SSH, Plex and other services were accessible, and I even successfully tested iPlayer over my VPN with the exit node feature - something that would have been useful while away to watch the Euros without the overly excitable Spanish TV commentary. The only extra bit of work I did was to set up a few ACLs to restrict access to certain endpoints.

I only have a handful of machines so I could probably have rolled my own VPN eventually, but Tailscale was much easier to set up and comes with handy features like ACLs, automatic NAT traversal and exit nodes.

I note there is also an open source Tailscale server alternative - Headscale - in case using a proprietary commercial service disturbs you somehow.

=> [IMG: Holiday, It Would Be So Nice]

Now I just need to go on another holiday so I can test it all properly. It's already booked.

Related Links

=> Tailscale

=> Headscale - Tailscale server alternative

Tags

=> life
=> linux
=> networking
=> vpn