I’m travelling for the moment, and usually I just access my home network with tailscale and it has always worked flawlessly. But the hotel I’m staying at apparently blocks VPN connections, I can’t use my regular VPN for work on their network either and I’ve tried obfuscation,different ports etc. nothing seems to work and it never connects.
How can I circumvent this, if at all? I’m staying for several weeks, so this is a pretty bug issue.
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I found my works wifi blocks most ports outbound, but switching my my vpn to a more ‘standard’ port like 80, 443, 22, etc gets through just fine.
Now I’ve got a couple port forwarding rules I can switch on, as needed, that take one of those and route it to my vpn host.
I’ve had this issue many times as well. I’ve found changing the MTU would help since it seems some filter specific ranges. Doesn’t always work but I’ve had more success than failure doing so
I’ll give that a go
MTU 1280 fixes all MTU problems, at a cost to performance.
Contact support and tell them you need VPN access on the WiFi you are paying for.
Seriously, lots of employees depend on VPNs to access their work computers. VPNs are also a great way to ensure the hotel isn’t snooping your internet traffic.
Have you passed their captive portal before turning on the VPN?
I haven’t encountered a captive portal at all. I can use the internet just fine without VPN.
Wild
This advice is what it is, but I work in a school and Tailscale also seems to be (unintentionally) blocked. After a while I realized it was only the login server that was blocked. If I login using my phone data I can go back to the regular network and it works.
This did the trick, ingot my tailscale to stay connected by using my phone AP to log on and then switched to hotel WiFi…thanks
It’s a headache most of the time so you might consider purchasing a local SIM card for 4/5G connection instead (and share connection via mobile phone) in the future.
Several weeks… might just be worth it to take a walk and find another hotel. Then cancel the rest of your nights at hotel#1 and cite their internet blocking policy of VPNs for the reason for cancelling the remainder of your stay, as it prevents you and many other professionals from working.
That is why i have everything that needs to be accessible, is reasonably secure and is not critical like management interfaces exposed.
You could try to http proxy your connection. As soon as the connection is then encrypted with https no firewall can block it.
The firewall probably blocks everything except port 80 and 443 and every protocol except tcp and udp.
If all you want is ssh the easiest and cheapest way might be to hire a VPS, connect to it and connect to tailscale there. Just ensure you have very strict rules on ssh and you should be safe enough.
Exposing web services in this manner is also easy using Caddy, but be careful since the services would then be publicly available.
No I want full access to my home media server for streaming, I have very little use for SSH only in this case.
Most hotels are terrible and even block any DNS configurations that aren’t controlled by them. If you do figure out a way, can you update your original post?
I’m surprised that Tailscale can’t get through, cleaver routing is one of Tailsacle’s features. Though I do sometimes have connection issues with Tailscale when running DNS-over-HTTPS on my laptop.
When you use someone else’s internet, there’s nothing you can really do. Maybe rent a VPS and set it up as relay.
