I have all my services running locally on a 192.168.10.x subdomain. Many are docker containers but some (like gitlab) are proxmox vms. Everything is behind a reverse proxy so I can access services through a url like paperless.mydomaon.com. the reverse proxy automatically pulls certs as needed.
This is great for accessing stuff when I’m home.
I’m trying to set up something for remote access. I don’t want to use cloudflare as I just want access for myself from my phone and laptop. So I’m leaning towards tailscale or similar.
But do I need to move all my services to use the tailscale subnet? Seems like a pain and also requires installing tailscale on everything (even on docker containers?). Or do I just install tailscale on the reverse proxy since it can reach everything else. But then I wouldn’t be able to ssh into a proxmox vm remotely unless I installed tailscale on the vm?
Or is this what the tailscale subnet router is for?
You can partially use Tailscale but yes, to use it you need to install it in all your devices.
At first I had it installed and just had a few use cases (mainly PiHole with MagicDNS which requires installing it in all your machines). But I still connected to ssh with the ip of the machine.
After I finished that initial set up then I closed all the ports and only allowed ssh from the tailnet.I think you can get away with installing it just in your reverse proxy and in the machine you want to point to if you have solved the issue of the DNS.
One thing to have in mind with this approach is that you won’t benefit from the routing of wireguard, since all your traffic needs to pass through the reverse proxy, a better approach would be to have each service with its own tailnet ip.The only issue I’ve found is if you have a container in a machine with tailscale, the container doesn’t know about the tailnet unless you have host network type or some other way to share a network which actually knows about tailscale.
Yes that’s what you can use the tailscale subnet routing for - one some machine on the lan, that joins the tailnet, you configure it up to route to local subnets
That’s great. Can I set the subnet router to use my local DNS? So service.mydomain.com will still route appropriately?
Yeah you should be able to set a custom dns for your whole tailnet I think, going by memory. I know I’ve had some issues but just try it, it’s quite fast to set up :)
Related question on the local subnets - I currently have Tailscale set up on my home server, phone, and laptop. However, it’s a little annoying that apps on my phone (like Synology Drive) should reference local IPs when on my LAN and then Tailscale IPs when outside of my home. Would you recommend setting up an alternate device at home (like Raspberry Pi) to function as a subnet router for Tailscale so that I can just use my local IPs no matter where I am? Is there any benefit to installing Tailscale on every device vs using a single subnet router for the entire home network?
You can try having the same hostname resolve on the lan to the local IP and only connect using that first part of the addess, having dns suffixes do the heavy lifting