Tailscale: Easy VPN

References

• Tailscale
• Tailscale Admin Console

Overview

This walkthough is the very basics of setting up a Tailscale VPN for travel.

Scenario: You like to travel, but have trouble accessing your accounts (banking, social media, entertainment) while you’re abroad. You travel with a laptop, but you also have a desktop device back home. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just access your accounts and services like you were sitting at your desktop?

Setup

This assumes you have two devices. One that we’ll call server will serve as our Exit Node. We’ll call the traveling device(s) client.

An Exit Node will be the exit point for our VPN (Virtual Private Network). We’ll have an encrypted connection from our client devices back through the Exit Node, and out to the open internet. To external sites and services, it will just look like you’re accessing the internet from your home network.

Client ————-> Tailscale Server ————-> Exit Node ————-> Internet

Install Tailscale

Download Tailscale from their site, or install if from your app store. This step is the same on both client and server devices.

Configure Tailscale

1. Create / Login to your Tailscale account via the app on both server and client devices.

2. On the server, configure tailscale to always run at startup, and to serve as an Exit Node.

3. In the Tailscale Admin Cosole, select your server and enable it to serve as an Exit Node for your Tailnet.

4. On your client device(s), select your server as your exit node.

5. (Optional) You can disable key expiration on your server device. This is a security feature; however, if you’re going to be traveling for a while / don’t want to have to think about it again - disabling key expiration will ensure that your server will remain logged into your Tailnet.

Conclusion

Tailscale has many more features not covered here - you can dive deep into Tailscale to configure DNS, service exposure, remote SSH access, access control rules… this tutorial barely scratches the surface.