I’ve spent too many hours googling this stuff without a solution in sight that I’m able to understand.
I am moderately new to selfhosting, especially the networking aspect. To put it simply, all I want is to be able to access my services through Tailscale by using subdomain.mydomain.com.
I have gotten so far to point my domain to my Tailscale IP (using Cloudflare’s DNS), so that I don’t have to copy paste the Tailscale IP, but that means I still have to type in the ports to the services. Between the posts saying Tailscale can handle this, to the ones saying Synology can do it, and the remaining posts saying to use a reverse proxy (and the ones saying reverse proxy are a bad idea because of Synology stuff) I am now very lost. The terminology is exhausting and everyone is already so knowledgeable that they skip the basic steps and go straight to complex, short answers.
I’d like to keep using Tailscale, as I don’t want to deal with security issues and SSL certificates and all that, and if possible I’d like to avoid using a reverse proxy such as npm or Caddy if there’s a built in Tailscale/Synology solution that works.
To me more services just means more stuff that can break, and I really just want this stuff to work without fiddling with it.
Thanks for any help you can provide
So here’s my two cents:
I think that if you have a bunch of services, then you should use caddy or Apache or nginx. doing this in caddy and Apache is not that difficult, but I understand the hesitation (I don’t have much experience with nginx)
If you just want to get something working you could do bookmarks with the http://host.whatever.com:port and that would be Gucci.
You could also use another registrar or name server besides Cloudflare to make URL redirect records. This is like an A record but it also includes a port. This is not a standard type of record, but some places will do it like Namecheap.
Again, if you want to do it the right and best way, then I do think a reverse proxy is the way to go.