I’ve spent too many hours googling this stuff without a solution in sight that I’m able to understand.

I am moderately new to selfhosting, especially the networking aspect. To put it simply, all I want is to be able to access my services through Tailscale by using subdomain.mydomain.com.

I have gotten so far to point my domain to my Tailscale IP (using Cloudflare’s DNS), so that I don’t have to copy paste the Tailscale IP, but that means I still have to type in the ports to the services. Between the posts saying Tailscale can handle this, to the ones saying Synology can do it, and the remaining posts saying to use a reverse proxy (and the ones saying reverse proxy are a bad idea because of Synology stuff) I am now very lost. The terminology is exhausting and everyone is already so knowledgeable that they skip the basic steps and go straight to complex, short answers.

I’d like to keep using Tailscale, as I don’t want to deal with security issues and SSL certificates and all that, and if possible I’d like to avoid using a reverse proxy such as npm or Caddy if there’s a built in Tailscale/Synology solution that works.

To me more services just means more stuff that can break, and I really just want this stuff to work without fiddling with it.

Thanks for any help you can provide

  • @StitchIsABitchOPEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    Thanks for the answers. I guess that was not clear from my post, but I do not want to expose anything to the internet. All I want to do is tidy up the urls to the services for clarity. I have no issue with installing Tailscale on every device I want to access my services with. I can currently access any service just fine by doing “tailscaleIP:PortOfService”, but that is kind of unpractical. So by using my domain and Cloudflare DNS I changed it to “mydomain.com:PortOfService” which is already better, but means I have to look up what port the service I need uses. Like I said in my post I’d ideally like “nameOfService.mydomain.com”, no ports. And yes I realize this is purely for convenience/aesthetic reasons. Apologies if my words are not clear enough.