I have been using Tailscale VPN with my servers for about 6 months now and I would recommend it to anyone.
I’m running it on both of my Proxmox machines, my laptop, a raspberry pi, and my Android phone. It makes it super easy and secure to access my local services while away from my house.
Very simple set up, minimal initial configuration, and versatile.
There are apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.
Is anyone else currently using Tailscale? I’d like to hear what you all think.
I like it, but it consumes copious amounts of battery on my Android phone. I only use it for 1)
ssh
and 2) services that I don’t want / need to be accessible over the Internet (admin tools)I have the same issue with 1.1.1.1 and cloudflare tunnels. It really kills my battery
I run pivpn with wireguard alongside tailscale for this exact reason. Wireguard in the phone, tailscale on PCs.
If you already have to setup and maintain WireGuard, what’s the added benefit of Tailscale for your use case?
In all honesty I ran both because I hadn’t yet discovered route advertisement on tailscale. Now that I’ve discovered that feature, I really only use wireguard for the phone due to battery drain with tailscale. Also, I can’t use wireguard on my work PC because the firewall drops all VPN traffic and tailscale gets around that. I’m not gonna pretend to know how it gets around that cause I haven’t bothered to learn it that deeply yet but it works and I like it.
I guess the TL;DR is tailscale bypasses firewall restrictions and wireguard doesn’t drain my phone battery.
I have an issue with my cell carrier blocking traffic to my home WireGuard server. It works from everywhere else and other cell services so I know it’s them. I’m definitely gonna try out Tailscale to see if it’ll get around it. Thanks for the tip. Too bad about the battery drain but I’m usually only hopping on for a minute to run a few commands over ssh or whatever so shouldn’t be a big deal.
Yeah tailscale is definitely useable on the phone if you toggle it only when you’re gonna use it. I keep it on because I have piHole as the VPN DNS so I get adblocking everywhere I go wether I’m on public wifi or cellular. So I need something that doesn’t drink battery juice. Wireguard ftw.
you use tailscale for ssh instead of termux?
I didn’t know what Termux was before this
But if it’s ssh on Android, I use Termius (which I haven’t used all that much tbh)
It does. I only turn it on when I need it.