Stians Tech Tips

Tailscale

Tailscale

Tailscale builds a private network (a “tailnet”) between all your devices using WireGuard, with none of the usual VPN hassle. You install it, log in on each device, and they can all reach each other directly by name, no matter which network they happen to be on. No port forwarding, no firewall rules, no static IPs.

I use it to SSH into my home computers from anywhere, as if everything were sitting on the same LAN.

On Windows you can install it with winget:

winget install Tailscale.Tailscale

On Linux:

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

A couple of features make it much more than “just a VPN”:

• Exit nodes let you route all your traffic through one of your own machines, so you can browse as if you were at home:

sudo tailscale up --advertise-exit-node

• Funnel publishes a single local service to the public internet over HTTPS, without opening any ports on your router:

tailscale funnel 3000

It’s become one of the first things I install on any new machine.