Tailscale

[BillyCarpenter]

I was looking for a solution to allow my son access to my Jellyfin account to watch movies. He's in Texas and I'm in Mississippi. I wasn't wanting to do any port forwarding. Here's what I found and it works flawlessly thus far. Anyone used this? Downside?


Description:

Tailscale is a free, open-source, peer-to-peer virtual private network (VPN) service that allows users to securely connect devices and services across different networks:

• How it works
  Tailscale creates a secure mesh network, called a tailnet, using encrypted tunnels between devices. This allows devices on the tailnet to communicate directly with each other, resulting in lower latency and higher throughput

[BillyCarpenter]

For anyone interested, this video explains Tailscale. I think its a game changer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzcs97XcxiE

[Hart]

Cloudflare Tunnel

[BillyCarpenter]

Cloudflare Tunnel

I checked into Cloudflare and others before I decided on Tailscale. With Cloudflare, you have to puchase a domain name and it could take up to 48 hours before it's active. And there's much more setup involved.

The great thing about Tailscale it that it takes about 3 minutes and it works. No domain to purchase,

[BillyCarpenter]

I'll elaborate on Tailscale and Jellyfin.

Here's the deal. I ripped my DVD collection and all my movies are on a external 4TB SSD.

What is Jellyfin?


Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server and app suite that allows users to:

• Organize, manage, and share digital media files
• Stream media to any device from a dedicated server
• Access media files across devices
• Create a Netflix or Spotify-like experience

This works great on an internal network as movies can be viewed all the PC's, phones, and other devices.

I was telling my son about this and telling him how great it was. But it does come a cost. You have to buy the DVDs. A bluray drive capable of ripping. And special software that is not cheap.

That got me to thinking. Instead of buying all that stuff for my son, how could I share my movies from my Media Server to son, who is in another state.

I really didn't know much about this. I've heard that you can purchase a dedicated ISP line but its very expensive. That's when I ran across Tailscale. I've already covered Tailscale so that shall suffice.

Anyway, I was worried that the 4K USD movies would stutter when my son would access them due to the sheer size of the files. These 4k files aren't compressed unlike Netflix, Amazon, ect.

My son says they play perfectly with no issues.

Now I can share with family and friends and its so simple to set up.

[BillyCarpenter]

So, I was thinking about other uses for Tailscale and it suddenly occured to me it can be used for Remote Backup. And unlike sharing JellyFin with my son, I can make some money with this.

I just successfully backup my PC to a remote loacation. Easy Peasy.

[BillyCarpenter]

Here's another use I found for Tailscale. I install tailscale on my phone and now I can access my IP cameras from anywhere in the world with no port forwarding.

Talescale is magical and it just works.

[BillyCarpenter]

Next I will try remote printing with Tailscale.

[BillyCarpenter]

Okay, so, setting up remote printing using tailscale is a bit more tricky because you can't install tailscale on a Kyocera printer or any printer that I know of, In order to do this, I must use the built in subnet router for tailscale and advertise a route. It's a good thing that I have a thorough understanding of subnets and advertising routes. Hopefully, I get this figured out., We shall see,

[Hart]

https://tailscale.com/kb/1019/subnets

[BillyCarpenter]

I have the remote printing figured out. I had to enable a route. That brought me back to when I was studying switches and routers. Which means: I've gone as far as I want with Tailscale. It can do a lot of other things but you've gotta get down into the technical weeds and I don't envision ever needing to go that far. lol