My Real World Tailscale Use Case

I have just received a message that our website is not working. Looked it up and it gave 503 nginx error. I knew it was something to do with nginx reverse proxy or the actual nginx serving the website. For context we are a small business selfhosting our website for numerou reasons about which I will talk in a different article.

I wanted to fix the problem even though I've been 200km away from office. And to access our server, which is a truenas instance I have to be in the same LAN. Here comes the power of VPNs.

Tailscale provides incredible ease of use, plenty of features and security. My usage for this example today was running two Tailscale nodes in the same tailnet. This allowed to make access the truenas web UI using it's IP in the tailnet. Therefore I could work as I was sitting next to the other device.

Once loaded the subpage of apps which is a list of docker compose projects, I saw my webserver stuck in deploying. This is a common behavior of an always restarting container due to crashes.

A manual restart gave me an error message which pointed me to a log file. Once again used potential of Tailscale to ssh into the truenas using the domain name of it therefore utilizing their magic DNS. Using the same ssh key pair as I used in the office but now it was over a different IP.

The log said the error was due to assigning an already assigned port to the container. Well this happened due to misconfigured GitHub actions variable, but GitHub actions is a topic for its own. ( At least the little I know.)

Just over few minutes I could fix the website and find the root cause.

I might be just scratching the surface of what Tailscale provides but it makes my life easier.

Alternatively there are other options to make such VPN but that's for another article.