Tailscale is a great little tool to allow you to setup your VPN between all sorts of devices and without the worry about issues like Firewalls or setting up VPN servers/concentrators. There’s loads of documentation on how to setup Tailscale, so I won’t repeat that here, but i’ll run through a quick example of something I wanted to have setup.
I have a Synology NAS, which I leave running all the time, I also have a CCTV DVR on the network which I like to access to watch footage or check in on things. The CCTV DVR has no built in methods for secure access via the Internet, so I’ve setup a Raspberry Pi running OpenVPN, it works quite nicely, but its a bit fiddly, and also it being a Raspberry Pi and on all the time, I get oddities with the MicroSD cards failing.
Tailscale however gives me additional and easier options, so I wanted to get that setup from my Android phone and my Synology NAS so I could access the CCTV DVR on my network, and additionally to access media from my Synology NAS when on the go.
Advertise Routes
After installing Tailscale on the NAS and it joining the network, I want to be able to reach the CCTV DVR on my network, for this you require a “Subnet Router”.
There is no GUI to enable this, so you need to temporarily enable SSH on your Synology NAS, then run:
sudo tailscale up --advertise-routes=<My Route> --resetWhere <My Route> is the IP subnet with subnet mask of your internal network, so for example: 192.168.10.0/24.
You then need to authorise this subnet within the tailscale web console by clicking the three dots “…” and then selecting “Edit Routing Settings…”, once selected turn on the subnet which should now have appeared within the list.
You should now find that you may access both the Synology NAS resources, but also anything on the network you advertised into your Tailscale network.
Great stuff!