Since her desk is far from the internet router, I added this little guy for her to have less cables and allow more connectivity.

Some companies aren't very big, and neither are their budgets. And of course, it might be said that there is no solution more permanent than a temporary one.

We've got a large-ish color laser printer (IIRC, an HP 4600) at one of our locations. It's not a big place; it has only had as many as 3 people working there regularly and has been normally staffed by exactly 1 person for the last several years.

When we moved into that building, a missing link was noticed: The printer did not feature wifi, and there was no way to get a clean ethernet drop to it without visible external conduit. The boss man didn't like the idea of conduit.

To get it working for now, I went over to Wal-Mart and bought whatever the current rev of Linksys WRT54G was. I put some iteration of Tomato on it so it could operate in station mode and graft the printer into the wifi network.

I plugged that blue Linksys box in back in 2007; it turned 18 years old this year.

It's pretty little slow by modern wifi standards, and the 2.4GHz band is much more congested than it used to be, but: It still works, and nobody seems motivated to spend money to implement a better solution... so it remains.

But now that I have it, the device is handy for family travel as well. Put an unlimited data eSIM in the device and everyone has “unlimited” data n the road and when we arrive at a hotel or AirBnB, one person signs it on to wifi and everyone is connected, including tailscale connections to home.

If I was doing personal and work travel only, I’d look for a smaller unit, but still with a decent battery.

If you go to https://tailscale.com/pricing?plan=personal

The first plan on the left called 'Personal' is free.

It uses a central orchestrator which is what requires you to sign up. If you prefer to self host your orchestrator you can look into Headscale, an alternative that seeks to be compatible with the clients.

> So, basically you leave a computer running at home, and this thing lets you pretend to be running your internet stuff through it while you’re on the road?

That's one thing you can do with it, yes. You can also run custom DNS entries across it, ACLs, it is very flexible.

It's especially handy if you want a secondary way in, in case you have problems connecting using wireguard, since it supports using a relay if you're stuck in a hotel with a heavily restricted connection.

If you run DNS at home, you can even configure it to use your home DNS and route to your home subnet(s).

My last gripe is more niche, but I found Zerotier's single threaded performance to be abysmal, making it basically unusable for small single core VMs. My searching at the time suggested this was a known bug, but not one that was fixed before I switched to Tailscale. Not impossible to work around, but also the kind of issue that didn't endear the product to me or inspire confidence.

Tailscale and ZT are not the same. ZT can do certain things that TS can't. One example is acting as a layer 2 bridge. Or a layer 3 bridge. TS can do neither. It can achieve mostly similar results though.

ZT can be a pain to setup. TS is a breeze. ZT's raw performance is quite poor. TS's is usually very good.

If I understood you correctly, you want both a way to access your home LAN when you're out - this is easy. Set up a node with NICs on the LAN subnets you want access to (I run it on my router), and configure the TS node to announce routes to those subnets. Install the TS client on your laptop and mobile and accept those routes. Job done.

If you also want to mask your egress - i.e. reach the Internet via your home network as if you were there - then you need a node (can be the same as above) configured to act as an Exit Node. When you want one of your devices to use this, just select the appropriate exit node. Job done.

It is simply a managed service that lets you hook devices up to an overlay network, in which they can communicate easily with each other just as though they were on a LAN even if they are far apart.

For example, if you have a server you'd like to be able to SSH into on your home network, but you don't want to expose it to the internet, you can add both it and your laptop to a Tailscale network and then your laptop can connect directly to it over the Tailscale network no different than if you were at home.

They even manage to squeeze some FUD into the opt-out toggle's name.

It also doesn't constantly try and ram any paid offerings down your throat.

I was originally put off by how much Tailscale is evangelised here, but after trying it, I can see why it's so popular.

I have my Ubuntu server acting as a Tailscale exit node.

I can route any of my devices through it when I'm away from home (e.g. phone, tablet, laptop).

It works like a VPN in that regard.

Last year, I was on a plane and happened to sit next to an employee of Tailscale.

I told him that I thought his product was cool (and had used it throughout the flight to route my in-flight Wi-fi traffic back to the UK) but that I had no need to pay for it!

Tailscale does use Wireguard, but it establishes connections between each of your devices, in many cases these will be direct connections even if the devices in question are behind NAT or firewalls. Not every use-case benefits from this over a more traditional hub and spoke VPN model, but for those that do, it would be much more complicated to roll your own version of this. The built-in access controls are also something you could roll your own version of on top of Wireguard, but certainly not as easily as Tailscale makes it.

There's also a third major "feature" that is really just an amalgamation of everything Tailscale builds in and how it's intended to be used, which is that your network works and looks the same even as devices move around if you fully set up your environment to be Tailscale based. Again not everyone needs this, but it can be useful for those that do, and it's not something you get from vanilla Wireguard without additional effort.

It can do way more than just being a VPN-to-home, but that's how most users use the free part.

Nothing that a network guru or even a sufficiently motivated hacker couldn’t do on their own, except that the maintenance is practically zero for the personal user and it’s actually easy enough for a very nontechnical person to use (not necessarily to set up, but to use), perhaps with a bit of coaching over the phone. Want to use a different exit point for your traffic? It’s a dropdown list. Share a file? Requires one config step on the client for macOS, once, and then it’s just in the share menu. Windows, Android, iOS are ready to go without that. Share whole directories? Going to require some command-line setup once per shared directory, but not after that.

There are features that are much more enterprise-focused and not as useful for personal stuff, but everything above is in the free version.

I’m not in tech at all, professionally, and never have been. I’m savvy for an end user - I can install Linux or a BSD, I can set up a network, I can install a VPN myself to get back to my home network - but I would never, ever call myself anything more than an interested layman. I probably could figure most of this out on my own, if I had to. Thing is, I don’t have to. It’s more than just Wireguard in a pretty wrapper.

Try it. It won’t take long to figure out why so many people here like it, even if you may not want to use it.

So pretty much anyone you would trust on your LAN can be trusted with your Tailscale user. You can just log yourself into Tailscale on the kids' devices and then use the admin console to make those devices' logins never expire. They can use all the features, but they don't know your authentication method and thus can't get admin access themselves. About the only situation in which the typical home user would need multiple accounts would be if someone was physically away from you and had a new device they needed to connect to your tailnet (their term for your collection of devices, services, etc.) but you didn't want to share your password with them. If they're physically near you, you just authenticate their device and hand it back to them.

In my defense, I'd argue that the average Tailscale user would be comfortable running an SSH command! And GL.iNet is just one very minor tweak away to making this entirely possible from the GUI. (though they might be intentionally avoiding it because of the support burden of quirks caused by Tailscale acting as a subnet router...)

I have a hardware controller, but I will probably end up putting it in my in-laws’ house because software is fine for where I live. I actually set the whole thing up via software controller and transferred the config when it was all set and I would only be making small changes.

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wifi/products/utr

Ubiquti does support wireguard natively. And you can get Tailscale running if you manually install the package through the SSH CLI.