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Setting up a VPN

In this quick note I want to document a very useful service I have been using, tailscale. This blog post is not sponsored, I genually benefit from their service and I think it is awesome.

Tailscale is a VPN with a generous free tier which lets up to 3 concurrent users access 100 devices on their VPN. Differently from other free VPNs, they give you a lot of freedom, for example you can open any port and host your services. This is awesome if you just need to connect to your computer / server remotely and you do not have control on port-forwarding in the router (which is my situation).

Installing tailscale

Installing tailscale is quite straight forward, there are instructions on their website for each linux distribution. For debian, the installation looks like this:

  • Add Tailscale's package signing key and repository:
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/debian/bookworm.noarmor.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/tailscale-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null
curl -fsSL https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/debian/bookworm.tailscale-keyring.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tailscale.list
  • Install Tailscale:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tailscale
  • Connect your machine to your Tailscale network and authenticate in your browser:
sudo tailscale up
#+end_src bash

- You can find your Tailscale IPv4 address by running:

#+begin_src bash
tailscale ip -4

Once you installed the application and logged in the platform, you have a dashboard with all your connected machines. Pretty amazing.

I have been using this service all the time to connect to my machines, and I can easily recommend it.

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