Tailscale is awesome

Tailscale is a lifesaver when traveling, and a great alternative to most commonly used software to connect remotely to other machines. Let me give you some personal examples.

Private VPN

Tailscale gives you a VPN between your devices, so they appear to be local between them.

I was preparing to travel away from home for a week, and I wanted to connect to my desktop machine just in case I needed something. I decided I could experiment with an SSH server, but I didn't want to open it to the internet (by opening the ports for everyone to hack into). So I installed Tailscale in both the travel notebook and the desktop PC.

Since I didn't open the ports to connect remotely through the internet, I was only able to do so in a local network... and it just happens that Tailscale acts as a VPN for all of your Tailscale devices! So I just go ssh user@tailscaleIP and voilà, I'm connected from the other hemisphere.

Connect to other devices without Tailscale

Tailscale allows you to show local network devices through its VPN, so you can connect to devices without Tailscale.

In my case, I wanted to connect to my PlayStation 5 as it were a local device to not have so many hops in the network. I established a machine in that network (my desktop PC) to advertise the local network as a subnet route.

Now, from my laptop, I just connected to it as it were on my local network, and it just works!

Have Tailscale act as an internet VPN

Tailscale allows you to set internet access through a machine in your network

Later on my trip I needed a VPN to my country, to be able to connect and buy some stuff only available nationally. The VPN provider I use (Mullvad, highly recommended) doesn't have servers in my country, so I needed an alternative.

I did try some other providers, but after using Mullvad, it just didn't feel right to create an account to use a VPN.

Reading through Tailnet's documentation, I found out I could be able to set a node in the network (again, my Desktop PC) as an exit node. In my laptop, I use that node as an exit node, and now I´m using my Desktop PC as a VPN server! All my network traffic is now going through my Desktop PC, for free.

But wait, there's more

There are some things I haven't used yet, but it's good to keep in mind:

• You can share nodes in your network with other Tailscale users
• You can transfer files between your nodes
• You can set up SSH to be only available through Tailscale
• You can expose nodes to the internet
• And if you're looking for ideas, the documentation has a lot of those!