How to access your home network from anywhere in the world.
WireGuard is a fast, modern, and secure VPN tunnel that uses state-of-the-art cryptography. It is designed to be simple, easy-to-use, and cross-platform. It can run on Linux, Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, Android, and other platforms. WireGuard aims to be faster, simpler, leaner, and more useful than IPsec and OpenVPN, two common VPN protocols. WireGuard is also well-defined and thoroughly considered in its academic whitepaper. Unraid has a built in wireguard option that is easy to set up and allows you to connect securely.
Tailscale is a service that lets you connect your devices and users together in your own secure virtual private network. It uses the WireGuard protocol to enable encrypted point-to-point connections. Tailscale has a Docker image that you can use to run Tailscale in a container. You can also use the Tailscale extension for Docker Desktop to share exposed container ports from your local machine with others on your tailnet. To use Tailscale in Docker, you need to build the Dockerfile, run the tailscaled agent, and pass in some parameters such as TS_AUTHKEY, TS_ROUTES, TS_SOCKS5_SERVER, etc. You can also use some environment variables to customize your Tailscale configuration. For more details, you can check out the documentation on Tailscale CLI commands and Tailscale on Kubernetes.
Tailscale and WireGuard are both VPN solutions, but they have some differences. WireGuard is an open-source VPN protocol that provides fast, simple, and secure point-to-point connections. It requires manual configuration and network topology management. Tailscale is a VPN service that uses WireGuard under the hood, but adds a layer of ease with its zero-config mesh networking. It automatically handles the connections between devices, authentication, and NAT traversal. Tailscale is free for personal use up to 3 users, but has paid plans for businesses.
To use Tailscale on Unraid, you need to do the following steps:
Tailscale lets you connect to other devices remotely over IP. To do this, you need Tailscale on both devices and you need to log in with the same account. You also need to invite other users to your network if you want to access their devices. You can use any protocol that works over IP, like SSH, RDP, VNC, etc. Just use the Tailscale IP of the device you want to connect to. It’s a 100.x.y.z address that you can see on the app or the website. For example, to use RDP on Windows, open the Remote Desktop app and type the Tailscale IP as the computer name. Now you can connect remotely and access your whole network from anywhere in the world as if you were at home.