Recently, a friend (Rolando Barry) mentioned "Tailscale" and it got me interested. I did a bit of research, and I found it to be right up my alley.

The short of it, is that its a private network between devices of your choice. For me, this lets me take my laptop, my NAS,my home server, my phone, my iPad, and anything else I want, and connect them all to each other.

Similar to how you can see all local devices on your network at an IP address (eg. 192.168.0.53), Tailscale lets me see all of my devices, regardless of what network each is connected to. Lets take an example of the NAS.

If it's local IP was 192.168.0.122, and I had that mounted on my laptop, everything works fine. I may pop to work, and then I want to grab one of my files. Shit, it's on the NAS. (Yes, most NAS boxes nowadays have some VPN thing you can set up too, but I have not)

Enter Tailscale. I have it installed on my laptop, and on the NAS. They all all connected to my "Tailnet", so I can open the Tailscale app and grab the IP of the NAS, and mount that. Perfect, grab my file, life is good.

This is a simple example, but the other advantages are simpler things most are familiar with. ssh is quick and easy, I can host local web dashboards on my home server and access them from anywhere on my phone, etc.

One of my new years goals was to read some more, but being a nerd, I had to dive deep and make it nerdy somehow, so I now have a Calibre server spreading my e-book library to the world. A quick button press on my Kindle, and I can grab any new book from my library in seconds.

The last thing that may be more useful in my work world, is that just as easily as I mounted my NAS, I can now connected to my Deadline Repository and monitor renders from anywhere I am, which is great for the peace of mind needed to trust my "set it and forget" system I have going with our current Deadline setup.

My closing notes would be, with 0 cons, and many pros, it's a no brainer to get Tailscale set up on your devices, because right now you don't need it, but when you do, you'll be glad you have it!