Tailscale

I never thought I’d say this to describe a networking tool + service, but Tailscale is deliverance to internet’s inertia problem I’ve been waiting for.

Kicking tyres, it took just five minutes to (a) sign-up and install Tailscale on two nodes (a very old iMac, and a very old MacBook Air), (b) connect one to my home network, and other to a cellular network, and (c) open a connection between the two. The experience is like you’re already there. Amazing! Here’s how it works.

In 2010, Avery Pennarun created sshuttle, which could open a tunnel between my laptop and my then $2/mo web host (with no admin access) with just this command:

$ ./sshuttle -r <username>@<webhost> 0.0.0.0/0 -v

Running this in a Terminal, I could access internet on my laptop at web host’s IP address — be it via browser, email, chat, terminal, or any app. In other words, with sshuttle I could re-purpose a cheap web host as my VPN!

Like I said, I’ve experienced this magic before, but Tailscale is an order of magnitude better, faster, and safer with WireGuard as its data plane. Tailscale also happens to be an offering by Avery and team. These good engineers have been thinking about enabling a poor man’s VPN for a decade, and are now working to get back the internet we’ve all wanted — access our home computer(s) from the road without the complexity or the horrors of security that come along with it.