From the article:
Since Tailscale was founded in 2019, customers have been forced to choose between either Tailscale or Mullvad without the ability for them to co-exist.
Today we announce a partnership with Tailscale that allows you to use both in conjunction through the Tailscale app. This functionality is not available through the Mullvad VPN app. This partnership allows customers of Tailscale to make use of our WireGuard VPN servers as “exit nodes”. This means that whilst connected to Tailscale, you can access your devices across Tailscale’s mesh network, whilst still connecting outbound through Mullvad VPN WireGuard servers in any location.
Announcement also on Tailscale blog.
Tailscale is a very cool way of seamlessly creating a private network spread out geographically. Devices sign into the Tailnet from anywhere. It’s very big in the selfhosted community (it has a generous free tier). For example my home servers are signed in, so I’m able to stream from my media server to my phone over my private Tailnet tunneled through the internet. I also have an offsite backup location with another server connected to the Tailnet for accepting automated backups.
The underlying technology is Wireguard. It is very smart about figuring out the most effective route - If I’m on my laptop in my home wifi, trafffic from my servers is direct, if I’m away somewhere, it’s piped though the net securely. What Tailscale adds is ease of setup and native apps for each device.
The privacy angle is that I’m able to get rid of all the cloud services I used to rely on. For example I don’t want my CCTV system connected to a cloud provider, but with Tailnet I can connect to my cameras over the internet without having to expose the system to a data mining corporation.
If Wireguard wasn’t so easy, and if I was just a little less interested in playing with setting up my own VPN, I would have use Tailscale. It’s what I’ll recommend to family members when they eventually come asking for a VPN.
That said, setting up a VPN with multiple nodes is pretty trivial for anyone with basic networking knowledge. IME it’s also extremely low maintenance; I have far more issues with the containerized apps I’m running occasionally barfing and needing tending than my little 7-node Wireguard VPN. I use Mullvad for the exit nodes and bandwidth (so as not to swamp my little VMs), but Tailscale doesn’t offer me much value.
Still, as I said, for non-technical people, Tailscale is pretty cool.
I’m probably a medium-techincal people :-) Wireguard won’t do the NAT traversal right? I can’t do the port forwarding thing because of the CGNAT for my connection.
I had it set up pretty well with OPNSense as the wireguard gateway into my home and the official wireguard client on my lineage phone and it was working great for a year but something changed recently where it’s become really unreliable. The problem is not OPNSense, but my phone. Not sure if it’s the client or lineageos causing problems.
So basically it’s a easier to set up VPN tunnel for your home network combined with a reverse proxy or did I misunderstand something. I still haven’t quite figured out the self-hosted aspect of it.
That’s a good description, yes. The self-hosted aspect is that it makes serving things from home, rather than a VPS, trivial.
For example I replaced Dropbox with an app called Syncthing. Previously to do this I would run Syncthing on a VPS so it was accessible from anywhere, or I would have run it at home but used a VPS with a reverse proxy over OpenVPN back to my house.
With Tailscale running on the Syncthing server at home I have a Tailscale IP address for that, which I use on my laptop to access Syncthing. No need for the VPS (especially important for a high storage requirements app), no complicated VPN setup, reduced attack surface, and the benefit of fast access when I’m at home.
