This isn’t going to be a tutorial, but I wanted to highlight an interesting self-managed VPN solution called Tailscale. It’s not the kind you pay money for – at least not as a home user. It’s not really for encrypted web browsing, either!
Instead, Tailscale creates an encrypted tunnel for communication between devices in what’s called a Tailnet. Say you have a NAS set up on your home network – by creating a Tailnet wherein your phone and the NAS are clients, you’ll be able to securely access the files sitting on your home network from anywhere in the world.
The best part is that once you’ve set up an account, it takes all of one minute to install and enable!
Personally speaking, I still had a home server or two connected to the internet via port forwarding. This was a simple way for me to address that vulnerability while maintaining remote use of my personal network’s resources.
If this sounds useful to you, just copy and paste the command on the download page then follow the onscreen instructions.
And no, this isn’t a sponsored post – though if you find someone willing to pay big money for exposure on a site that pulls in ten hits a day, do let me know!