Why I Moved From Zerotier To Tailscale
Overview
I had been using Zerotier one for a while and worked great. The main use was to remotely connect to Home Assistant. After listening to an episode of Linux Unplugged (I think episode 525) I thought I’d check out Tailscale.
Support and Community
There are so many articles demonstrating how to integrate Tailscale into your homelab ecosystem. From something as simple as platform support through to out of the box reverse proxy with SSL using Caddy to Traefik v3. Not to mention the videos from Alex
Test
The first test was to change the Home Assistant deployment pipeline. Tailscale has an article on how you can use the VPN in GitHub Actions. For more information on this pipeline see here.
Less than an hour later and it was up and running. This proves to me it has the Dropbox like effect: Integrations. Dropbox may not be the best cloud storage but it was supported by many services back in the day.
ACL
The access control levels is superior in one way: Tests. You can take a test driven development approach by defining tests that should or should not allow access. Any changes from that point forward that breaks the test will prevent ACLs from being updated until it’s fixed.
In theory, this would in theory allow you not to be locked out of your own network. I say theory because the ACLs can be updated from the web admin console without requiring access to the VPN.
MagicDNS
A nice concept of using hostnames globally within the tailscale network. This meant you could reach a node by their name regardless of their Tailscale IP addresses.
Unfortunately, I had issues on Android 13 and 14 where sites and connections would fail and turns out it’s related to having MagicDNS enabled.
Tailscale SSH
A SSH client with built in Tailscale. It
Git Ops
The examples provided by Tailscale are great way to get into DevOps. They have examples from using Tailscale in Github Actions through to managing the ACLs in Github. These are real world use cases that have guides to setting them up in operation from the authors of the software.
Summary
I’m really pleased with the advance and supporting content for Tailscale. I can see myself moving to their starter tier soon.
