If you have read through the previous articles, I have a setup where applications are securely accessible to me from anywhere. That is all well and good until something breaks, and I have to fix it. No big deal when I am home, but how would I do that if what I am trying to fix is the one that helps me access it remotely? Enter Tailscale , a point-to-point mesh VPN topology private LAN overlay over the internet. Tailscale is a game-changer when it comes to VPN technologies. It accomplishes this using WireGuard , another up-and-coming technology for secure, simple tunneling.
Tailscale is marketed as a zero-configuration VPN and keeps up to the marketing very well. All you need is an account. Proceed to install the Tailscale clients on all your devices, and boom! All of them are now a part of the same network, irrespective of where they might be. Tailscale allocates stable IPs to endpoints in the CGNAT address space and works behind any NAT/firewall configuration using NAT-T. For anything more restrictive, Tailscale falls back to using a public relay to move traffic between endpoints.
The advantage of Tailscale is that all of the connections are end to end encrypted and secure courtesy of WireGuard and accessible thanks to the zero-config deployment from Tailscale. I have this installed on my PCs, laptops, phone, VMs, and anything that I will be remoting in from or to. I even installed it on my router, which runs on OpenWRT, but due to filesystem size limitations, through a custom implementation here . It supports subnet routing to access devices not running the Tailscale client and exit node, meaning I can use it as a traditional VPN to mask my current internet location like a hotel Wi-Fi. It is limited to 20 devices and one subnet router per account, which is more than enough to start a home lab.
I would highly suggest reading their blog on how it works. It is a pageturner afternoon read, and if you are remotely interested in computer networking, you will find that blog fascinating. It is still a developing technology and thus has a high rate of feature additions. One of the recent ones notable to mention is Taildrop , a peer-to-peer (in your Tailscale “virtual” network) file sharing feature. I, for one, have my eyes peeled on what else they pull out of their magic hats.