Yet another Tailscale post huh? Can’t blame me, can you?
There I was, back home in Seattle, my parents gone for the weekend, and I was bored. What if I watch the fourth season of the Sopranos?
Great, I’ll just watch it on my phone through my Jellyfin app… oh wait! My parents have a great LG TV that I can watch on. What if I cast the Jellyfin content from my phone to the TV? Spinny circle spinny circle, no output.
My parents’ TV has no access to my Jellyfin container all the way back in LA.
How do I solve this in an afternoon with nothing but a Raspberry Pi and some network magic?
I regularly find myself wanting to share photos from my self-hosted Immich instance on my server with my friends.
If you’ve followed my previous post on my self-hosting journey, you’ll know I love Tailscale and its ability to let me share things with friends and family without exposing my local network. However, Tailscale obviously isn’t the best when my friends and family don’t want to install it and simply want a photo album detailing my most recent trip.
Fine.
I’ll do something about it.
What if we use Cloudflare Tunnels with custom JWT token authentication and split access to important albums and not so important albums?
I am an avid Tailscale user. I have a homelab running on my 12 year old PC with Proxmox, and I have several containers all hooked up together. It’s great. I can backup my photos, use my NAS, and run whatever linux container I want. And I can access them from all of my devices.
But if I want to share these services with my friends and family, I need them to download Tailscale and access the nodes that I share with them. Friction.
Worse yet, Tailscale isn’t on some devices like the Nintendo Switch or the Playstation. Friction.
I want to be able to play Minecraft with my friends while hosting on my homelab, but I don’t want to portforward 25565 and share my home network IP address like it’s 2011 anymore. Surely, if we have Tailscale magic we’re past that?
Nearly! With a bit of help from our friend iptables and a free vm from Oracle Cloud, we can do some networking magic to get my friends on my homelab minecraft server, and they don’t even know it!