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Comment by Graffur | Hacker News Reader

This is the first I have heard of Tailscale. Who uses it? Is it appropriate to put something like this together for a family household?

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I use it for a simple use case of connecting to my home assistant server from outside my network without having to open ports.

I just installed the tailscale app on my home assistant server (ubuntu) and then installed it on my iPhone. Then once they're both logged in I can use the IP address in the tailscale app to connect to the server from anywhere.

Like mentioned in the article it just works and is perfect just the way it is, for free. I don't need any extra features or improvements.

So, will it be possible to do ssh to my home machine with my office laptop, if both have tailscale app? I imagine even if it were possible, office network security might block it.

yes, though you should make sure you are allowed to install such software on your office laptop.

Its not great for family because the free tier is limited to one user.

It's also not super great for some workplaces because tailscale kinda...gets superpowers in your network.

It is definitely something smaller companies are using though.

Having one user isn't really that bad of a limitation for a family, just share the login. Unless you want to prevent certain family members from accessing certain devices at a network level for some reason.

They limit it to auth providers, so I don't know if that'd be the best thing.

https://login.tailscale.com/start

It ties to OAuth logins (Google, github), that doesn't fit soo well with "just share login", although you could make a dedicated Github account just for it I guess.

Ah yeah forgot about that part, I do have a throw away google account used for these things

> It's also not super great for some workplaces because tailscale kinda...gets superpowers in your network. It is definitely something smaller companies are using though.

There are banks [1] using Tailscale. If their security concerns can be addressed, I'm sure it can work for pretty much any company.

[1] https://tailscale.com/customers/versabank/

Tailscale may have given them a custom solution. If not it'd be pretty irresponsible to run it the way tailscale runs right now in a banking situation.

How's that? Lots of banks use, for instance, hosted Okta as their source of truth for all authentication.

You think banking cyber-security is waaaay better than it actually is. Many don't offer 2FA and require password lengths that can be cracked in less than a week on decade old hardware.

It's fine for families with the sharing nodes feature[0]. My family and I use it for a few services hosted on different machines in different locations (Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and some others).

It's an easy way to get remote access to services when away from home, or when the family lives in different homes but wants to share services. I wrote a guide explaining how to set up remote access for Jellyfin using Tailscale[1], which may illustrate the use case.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ [1]: https://www.ethanmad.com/post/jellyfin_remote_access/

They address that in their pricing page (and linked article):

> The Community on GitHub plan can get you up to 25 users, 5 devices per user, and 2 admins for free.

They have a "Community on GitHub" plan¹ that's free if you're using it either for an open-source project, or "to interconnect your own friends and family". It does mean your friends & family have to use GitHub to authenticate though, but that seems like a pretty small restriction.

¹https://tailscale.com/kb/1154/free-plans/

I use it for remote access to a fileserver and SSHing into a machine from my phone while I'm on the go, without having to expose a port to the internet. I tried a few alternatives and found them to be clunky. Tailscale just worked, even with someone more complicated parts of networking like Bonjour/Rendezvous/Avahi/mDNS

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