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Setting up Tailscale

I’ve heard of Tailscale but never really looked into it until now. I was using my devices on unsecured wifi a lot more often now and wanted to setup my own vpn to use when out and about on my laptop and phone, this would enable to me have a more secured network anywhere and to access my local only services like my proxmox server.

I’ve setup OpenVPN for different organizations before and it took its time to get setup to a working state often.

So its time now to try out tailscale, after a quick search and on their site. You’d find a get started button where you sign in through a single sign-on, I chose google as mine.

Next you’ll go through a quick on-boarding form, after you’ll need to add your first device. I’m on MacOS so i downloaded tailscale through the app store.

You’ll then join your network by signing in through the account you used on the SSO.

Next I need to add my second device, my proxmox server so i can access all my services when away from home.

I’ll access my server locally through my home network and install tailscale through the home node console.

I ran this command to automatically install tailscale

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

afterwards i then had to run “tailscale up” which gave me a url to authenticate through my login, this added my proxmox server to my network.

I found you can use a device as a network node, due to my server being up 247, i decided to enable the feature on this device. I had to run tailscale up --advertise-exit-node to get the option available.

Now when i’m away from home all my network should route securely through my home network.

Overall, installing and setting up tailscale was enjoyable and easy to get to a working state.

One problem i had was that I had to enable sub-routes on the proxmox server in order to access local ips for my different services. Luckily the documentation is written well and shows you step by step on how to do this, in this case i was able to get it up and ready in 5 minutes.