alt Hacker NewsI don't get the appeal of Tailscale for simple homelab use. I have OpenVPN and it's trivial. Hit the toggle and I'm connected, no fuss.
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Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure, configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't notice a significant difference
OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to Tailscale.
I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I get access to my network also at hotels and other shady places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked.
Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve the same result using OpenVPN.
And Tailscale creates a wireguard mesh which is great since not everything goes through the central server.
You should give it a try.
Tailscale is much more reliable in my experience. OpenVPN isn't very reliable in my experience as a network admin. And IPsec is an abomination.
Tailscale (and similar services) is an abstraction on top of Wireguard. This gives you a few benefits:
1. You get a mesh network out of the box without having to keep track of Wireguard peers. It saves a bunch of work once you’re beyond the ~5 node range.
2. You can quickly share access to your network with others - think family & friends.
3. You have the ability to easily define fine grained connectivity policies. For example, machines in the “untrusted” group cannot reach machines in the “trusted” group.
4. It “just works”. No need to worry about NAT or port forwarding, especially when dealing with devices in your home network.