I have been using Tailscale VPN with my servers for about 6 months now and I would recommend it to anyone.
I’m running it on both of my Proxmox machines, my laptop, a raspberry pi, and my Android phone. It makes it super easy and secure to access my local services while away from my house.
Very simple set up, minimal initial configuration, and versatile.
There are apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.
Is anyone else currently using Tailscale? I’d like to hear what you all think.
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It’s not self-hosted, I refuse to use anything that relies on any third party
You could checkout a very similar product, ZeroTier (Open Source Community Edition) assuming your use case is non-commercial.
… if you’re willing to use an older release, you could potentially do whatever you want as the software uses a BSL license with a change date fallback license of Apache 2.0.
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No, it isn’t. But there is a self hosted Foss version of it (headscale) that the developers actively support.
It’s not self-hosted but it’s incredibly useful for self-hosting as it makes public access to locally hosted services a breeze. It’s user-friendly, feature-rich and scalable.
This looks like a paid business vpn… are you even hosting it? I don’t get it
It’s free for personal use, although they offer paid versions for enterprise. It’s built using Wireguard, so there is a coordination server that’s accessed using the web app, but all the traffic is encrypted from client to client.
I like it, but it consumes copious amounts of battery on my Android phone. I only use it for 1)
sshand 2) services that I don’t want / need to be accessible over the InternetI run pivpn with wireguard alongside tailscale for this exact reason. Wireguard in the phone, tailscale on PCs.
If you already have to setup and maintain WireGuard, what’s the added benefit of Tailscale for your use case?
In all honesty I ran both because I hadn’t yet discovered route advertisement on tailscale. Now that I’ve discovered that feature, I really only use wireguard for the phone due to battery drain with tailscale. Also, I can’t use wireguard on my work PC because the firewall drops all VPN traffic and tailscale gets around that. I’m not gonna pretend to know how it gets around that cause I haven’t bothered to learn it that deeply yet but it works and I like it.
I guess the TL;DR is tailscale bypasses firewall restrictions and wireguard doesn’t drain my phone battery.
I have an issue with my cell carrier blocking traffic to my home WireGuard server. It works from everywhere else and other cell services so I know it’s them. I’m definitely gonna try out Tailscale to see if it’ll get around it. Thanks for the tip. Too bad about the battery drain but I’m usually only hopping on for a minute to run a few commands over ssh or whatever so shouldn’t be a big deal.
Yeah tailscale is definitely useable on the phone if you toggle it only when you’re gonna use it. I keep it on because I have piHole as the VPN DNS so I get adblocking everywhere I go wether I’m on public wifi or cellular. So I need something that doesn’t drink battery juice. Wireguard ftw.
I have the same issue with 1.1.1.1 and cloudflare tunnels. It really kills my battery
It does. I only turn it on when I need it.
That’s awesome to hear. I’m looking to set up some self-hosted stuff, and I see a lot of recommendations for Tailscale for the VPN element.
Isn’t tailscale just a company abstracting over a more barebones VPN? I haven’t looked into it, but want to operate a VPN into my home network in the future.
Why would I choose tailscale over just selfhosting wireguard?
I was using this for a bit actually, only reason I stopped was the network filters at work broke it…but I might try headscale down the road to see what that does…
I’m sat behind a CGNAT for my home internet, so I can’t really forward ports in. Tailscale has been great as a free thing to let me get a quick-and-easy VPN set up so I can remote into my network reliably.
I took a quick look and it says it has a free option for individuals with practically everything unlocked, what’s the point of that? It’s a trick I guess?
It’s not a trick at all. They want personal users to use it on the chance they then introduce it to work.
They are a very positive company that supports the FOSS community. It is a great product.
You only get 3 users with the free version
I run a single headscale node on one of my free Oracle OCI instances, and connect about a dozen devices to it. No fear of adding friends either, since it’s free.
I prefer ZeroTier, I’m not sure why Tailscale has taken off so much in recent years (perhaps just the cleaner UI and better marketing).
