Your home network from anywhere with Tailscale
The problem every home network guide ignores
You leave home. Your server, NAS, smart TV, or Raspberry Pi is still sitting on your home network. To reach it remotely, every tutorial tells you to open a port on your router, configure a firewall rule, set up dynamic DNS, and hope your ISP does not rotate your IP. That is six hours of work and a permanent hole in your network. Tailscale solves this in about fifteen minutes. It creates an encrypted mesh network between your devices so that your laptop, your phone, and your home server all behave as though they are plugged into the same router, wherever they physically are. No open ports. No firewall rules. No public IP needed. The free Personal plan supports up to 6 users and unlimited devices, and it is free forever for personal use.
Setup time
About 15 minutes
Cost
Free (Personal plan, up to 6 users)
Difficulty
Beginner, no networking knowledge required
Platforms
Windows 10+, macOS 12+, Linux, iOS 15+, Android 8+
Step 1. Create your Tailscale account
Go to tailscale.com and click Get Started. Sign in with an existing account from Google, Microsoft, GitHub, or Apple. Tailscale deliberately has no separate password: it piggybacks on an identity provider you already use and already protect with two-factor authentication. Once you sign in you land in the admin console. You have a tailnet, which is the private name for your mesh network. Right now it is empty.
Step 2. Install on your devices
Install the Tailscale client on every device you want in your network. Sign in with the same account on each one, and the device appears in your admin console immediately. Windows: download and run the installer from tailscale.com/download. Accept the network adapter prompt when Windows asks. macOS: install from the Mac App Store or download the PKG file from tailscale.com. Requires macOS Monterey 12.0 or later. Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS): run the one-line script in a terminal. sudo curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh Then bring the node up and authenticate in your browser: sudo tailscale up iOS: install from the App Store (iOS 15 or later). Android: install from Google Play (Android 8 or later). Sign in and the device joins your tailnet. After installing on two devices, open a terminal and ping from one to the other by its Tailscale IP (shown in your admin console, always in the 100.x range). If you get replies, the tunnel is working.
Step 3. Reach every device on your home network
This is the step most guides skip. The basic install gives you access to the specific machine Tailscale is installed on. Your router, NAS, printer, or smart home hub are still unreachable unless you install Tailscale on each one individually. Subnet routing fixes this. Install Tailscale on one always-on Linux machine (a Raspberry Pi works well). Then run these commands to enable IP forwarding: echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf echo 'net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding = 1' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/99-tailscale.conf
Step 3 continued. Advertise and approve the route
Replace 192.168.1.0/24 with your actual home network range (check your router settings if unsure, most home networks use 192.168.0.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24): sudo tailscale set --advertise-routes=192.168.1.0/24 Now open your admin console, find the machine, click the three-dot menu, and select "Edit route settings." Approve the route. On your other devices, run: sudo tailscale set --accept-routes Every device on your home network is now reachable from anywhere, even devices with no Tailscale client installed.
Step 4. Enable MagicDNS for easy hostnames
By default you reach devices by their 100.x IP address. MagicDNS gives every device a hostname so you can run ssh myserver instead of ssh 100.64.0.3. In the admin console, go to DNS and enable MagicDNS. Tailscale registers a local DNS server at 100.100.100.100 on every device in your tailnet. Each machine gets a stable address in the form hostname.your-tailnet.ts.net, and a short hostname that works within your tailnet. Once enabled, from your laptop anywhere in the world: ssh username@myserver Works exactly as if you were home.
iOS and Android SSH apps sometimes fail to resolve MagicDNS names because their queries go to the OS resolver rather than Tailscale's. If ssh myserver does not resolve on mobile, use the raw 100.x address instead. You can add a Host alias in your SSH config file to map a friendly name to the numeric address permanently.
A Tailscale exit node lets you route all internet traffic from a remote device through your home connection, not just traffic to your home network. Useful for browsing on public Wi-Fi or accessing region-locked content that is available at home. Enable it in the admin console on the home machine, then toggle it on in the Tailscale app on your remote device when you need it.