A few days ago I decided to try Tailscale and I’m not looking back. It’s been a long time since I had an experience this good with something which usually is as cumbersome as VPN management.
Setting it up is really simple, there’s an app for your preferred platform, in Ubuntu you can install it with an Ansible playbook like this one:
- name: add tailscale apt-key
ansible.builtin.apt_key:
url: https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/ubuntu/focal.gpg
- name: add tailscale repository
ansible.builtin.get_url:
url: https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/ubuntu/focal.list
dest: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list
mode: '0644'
- name: Install tailscale and update apt cache
ansible.builtin.apt:
name: tailscale
update_cache: yes
Then you authenticate your nodes through your control panel and they conform a mesh. And that’s it, profit.
A possible next step you can follow is setting up a filtering DNS like Pihole in one of your boxes (use one geographycally close to you) and have Ad free browsing from all your devices even when you’re out of your LAN.
Tailscale has another great feature named Magic DNS that automatically generates a DNS entry for your nodes. I found an issue when having Magic DNS enabled and a DNS server with an address in the Tailscale range (CGNat, 100.64.0.0/10) but it’s easy to work around this for the time being by disabling Magic DNS, creating a subdomain for your Tailscale hosts and adding it to the search domains.
5/5, would recommend.