A Quick Guide to Setting up Tailscale in your Homelab
Note: This guide follows what I've done in debian 12. It could potentially work on other linux distros.
Why?
Tailscale is a VPN set up that allows you to securely access your machines. Machines not authenticated to your tailnet will not be able to attempt login to your machine. SSH is not exposed to the WAN. Tailscale creates a tailnet of your devices, and now you can access those devices by authenticating to your tailnet and using SSH.
The Guide
To start set up, first use the following command
curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
Thee above requires you to be a sudoer. It will provide a link, there you can log in(with an existing account, sso, or create an account)
Check your IP and that you're connected
tailscale ip -4
It will return your tailscale IP.
Then you can allow it on your firewall with:
sudo ufw allow in on tailscale0
Now you'll be able to ssh from any device also authenticated to your tailscale account.
Limitations
You will run into problems with VPNs, even if they offer split tunneling options. Tailscale does have a Mullvad Add-on but it's separate from your Mullvad account and would require you to pay through tailscale. You may prefer a different setup. I use Mullvad and have not been able to split tunnel with Tailscale. I am looking into alternative setups.