I’ve read a lot of recommendations for tailscale and am on my way to try it out myself. Do you use Tailscale in the “normal” way or do you host your own Headscale server (as I’m planning to do)? Any pros and cons?

  • Xe :verified:
    2•10 months ago

    @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.