I don't get the appeal of Tailscale for simple homelab use. I have OpenVPN and it's trivial. Hit the toggle and I'm connected, no fuss.

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Cyph0n 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tailscale (and similar services) is an abstraction on top of Wireguard. This gives you a few benefits:

1. You get a mesh network out of the box without having to keep track of Wireguard peers. It saves a bunch of work once you’re beyond the ~5 node range.

2. You can quickly share access to your network with others - think family & friends.

3. You have the ability to easily define fine grained connectivity policies. For example, machines in the “untrusted” group cannot reach machines in the “trusted” group.

4. It “just works”. No need to worry about NAT or port forwarding, especially when dealing with devices in your home network.

	▲	andrew_eu 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also it has a very rich ACL system. The Immich node can be locked out from accessing any other node in the network, but other nodes can be allowed to access it.

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robcohen 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure, configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't notice a significant difference

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Jnr 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to Tailscale.

I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I get access to my network also at hotels and other shady places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked.

Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve the same result using OpenVPN.

And Tailscale creates a wireguard mesh which is great since not everything goes through the central server.

You should give it a try.

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sva_ 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Why not just use wireguard directly? The configuration is fairly trivial

	▲	Jnr 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Wireguard is great, I have personally donated to it and have used Wireguard for years before it became stable. And I still use it on devices (routers) where Tailscale is not supported. But as Jason stated - it is quite basic and is supposed to be used in other tools and this is what we are seeing with solutions like Tailscale. Tailscale makes it simple for the user - no need to set up and maintain complex configurations, just install it, sign in with your SSO and it does everything for you. Amazing!
	▲	palata 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		With Tailscale you don't have to learn anything, you just install apps and click. One value of Tailscale for a ton of simple use-cases is that people don't have time / don't want to learn.
	▲	iAMkenough an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even more trivial with Tailscale, so why wouldn’t I use Tailscale to configure wireguard for me?

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UltraSane 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tailscale is much more reliable in my experience. OpenVPN isn't very reliable in my experience as a network admin. And IPsec is an abomination.