How do you use Tailscale?

I use Headscale, but Tailscale is a great service and what I generally recommend to strangers who want to approximate my setup. The tradeoffs are pretty straightforward:

• Tailscale is going to have better uptime than any single-machine Headscale setup, though not better uptime than the single-machine services I use it to access... so not a big deal to me either way.
• Tailscale doesn't require you to wrestle with certs or the networking setup required to do NAT traversal. And they do it well, you don't have to wonder whether you've screwed something up that's degrading NAT traversal only in certain conditions. It just works. That said, I've been through the wringer already on these topics so Headscale is not painful for me.
• Headscale is self-hosted, for better and worse.
• In the default config (and in any reasonable user-friendly, non professional config), Tailscale can inject a node into your network. They don't and won't. They can't sniff your traffic without adding a node to your tailnet. But they do have the technical capability to join a node to your tailnet without your consent... their policy to not do that protects you... but their technology doesn't. This isn't some surveillance power grab though, it's a risk that's essential to the service they provide... which is determining what nodes can join your tailnet. IMO, the tailscale security architecture is strong. I'd have no qualms about trusting them with my network.
• Beyond 3 devices users, Tailscale costs money... about $6 US in that geography. It's a pretty reasonable cost for the service, and proportional in the grand scheme of what most self-hosters spend on their setups annually. IMO, it's good value and I wouldn't feel bad paying it.

Tailscale is great, and there's no compelling reason that should prevent most self-hosters that want it from using it. I use Headscale because I can and I'm comfortable doing so... But they're both awesome options.

I started using my own WireGuard config instead of using tail scale. Works great for me, though it does take more work up front.

@Jerry1098 I’m using it the normal way. It works very well for me.

Honestly the main reason to use Tailscale for me is that it handles all the setup itself.
I don't really see the point in Headscale. If I wanted to worry about hosting and configuring I'd prolly just setup regular Wireguard.

Tailscale is super simple. Install it on two computers you want to be able to talk to eachother, doesn't matter where they are as long as they have internet access. Authenticate with Tailscale on both computers and you are done.

I use Tailscale as is. Mainly to connect to my devices but also for fancy stuff like this:

Some of my servers are only available via Tailscale. They don't have any open ports to the internet. Even authentication to these servers via SSH is handled by Tailscale SSH.

I have some SMB shares on my local server and I gave access to it to some friends via Tailscale by sharing said server and lock it down ACLs. So people that have "shared" access can only access the server via SMB's ports.

One more thing I wanted to use but then stopped screwing around with it: Tailscale Funnel. I wanted to access some local webservices on my server via the internet without connecting to Tailscale first but also without opening ports on my local router. The downside of Funnel: no custom domains (yet). This means I would have to use their Tailnet name instead. Instead I went with Cloudflare Tunnel.

One more thing that was annoying with Funnel: I wanted to use tsnet for quick file shares via a very basic HTTP server. Tsnet created "virtual" machines within mail Tailnet which I could then funnel to the internet. Unfortunately, Tailnet DNS propagation is absurdly slow. It's not really made for on-demand funnel usage. It would work just fine while being connected to the Tailnet via Tailscale, but not via Funnel over the internet.

All in all, I'm super happy with Tailscale. Setting things up was so absurdly easy and it just works.

I'm using it for work.

At first it was just me, I needed a remote access and I was not a big fan of using the chrome remote desktop that was the "solution" by their IT technician.

So I've setup tailscale and used it to access the shared folders and Remote Desktop.

After that, with my boss approval, I've set it up for several others person in the company and external consultant. Honestly it's great, it just work, it's secure and it is so easy to set up. With just few WhatsApp messages I can give instructions to have the remote desktop running, even to people not especially comfortable with computers.

If you want to really get into it, you can just hose a wireguard instance in a LXC then use iptables for all your routing.

Relies only on FOSS software and gives you a pretty high level of control, but obviously is less intuitive

How does it compare to ZeroTier?

I am using headscale without any issues

Tailscale is great but I find it non trivial to run in conjunction with another VPN (Mullvad). Anyone have experience with this? Seems I can have only one or the other for iOS or macOS

Hosted headscale for quite a while, it works great and there is plenty of help in the discord if you need it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #92 for this sub, first seen 30th Aug 2023, 12:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

@Jerry1098 Note my bias as I work for @tailscale, but:

• I use the normal SaaS control plane with a tailnet shared with my husband

• All our machines (towers, phones, laptops, steam decks, homelab nodes, virtual machines, etc) are on our tailnet and can access the storage on the NAS

• I've written a number of custom tsnet services that do a wide range of things:

  • A private pastebin called tclip
  • A tool to check if my external Mullvad VPN on my NAS is working called vest-pit-near
  • Control endpoints for my CDN named XeDN
  • Other tools that let me do things like monitor Linux ISO release channels or experiments like an "infinite wiki" powered by ChatGPT and Llama 2

• Almost all of my SSH connections are over Tailscale SSH, even over my local network, it's likely that there's more WireGuard and TLS traffic over the local network than there is clear text for anything else.

• The NAS is mounted over Tailscale via SMB due to how MagicDNS intersects with Windows. It's kinda neat and gives us a bunch of room for treating it as slower storage on our machines.

• I share the preview version of my blog over Funnel. Previously I used node sharing to do that, but I started running into the 10 share limit. Sharing it over Funnel does mean that my development site does eventually make its way to random people, but really it's okay.

• When I travel I either use an exit node while on sketchy public WiFi. When I was at DEF CON recently I set up my own exit node on a budget host in Vegas so that I would have a moderately trustable egress point without suffering from high latency.

I love it so much I ended up working there. It's been one of my best tech finds in a long time. Feel free to ask me anything about how you can use Tailscale! I'm more than happy to answer.

I'm a newbie in self-hosting and Tailscale is super powerful for me. Everything at home is accessible on my phone, mainly music server and radarr/sonarr for watching show on the go. No need for subdomain or reverse proxy.

use installed on edgerouter-x, no problem, efficient and functional

I'm using Headscale with minimal issues. It's low on resource and the docs Tailscale provides applies to it which is neat.

I’m new with Tailscale. I understand that they don’t manage accounts and require another service like google or apple. That initially turned me off. Then I set up via my sso provider and works great.

Tailscale just works, I recently tried netbird and netmaker. I did not manage much with the first but netmaker instead seemed even easier to manage than tailscale, being faster at the same time. Unfortunately it failed with peers behin my corporate NATwhich tailscale can bypass with its own relays. But for others it can work very well.