I wanted to run my VPN/Tailscale setup past you, see if anybody has suggestions on how I could do things better.
- Setup: home LAN (
10.0.0.0/24
), router+DNS on10.0.0.1
, server running docker containers on10.0.0.2
. - LAN DNS points
*.local.dom.tld
to the server, public DNS points*.dom.tld
to my dynamic public IP. - Containers run in bridge mode with host, expose ports on host IPs via “ports:” mapping.
- NPM with LE certs also in container, exposes
10.0.0.2:443
, forwards to various other services.
Goals for Tailscale:
- Accessing HTTP services via NPM from my phone when away from home.
- Exposing select UDP and TCP non-HTTP services such as syncthing (:22000) or deluge RCP admin (:58846) to other tailnet devices or to phone on the go.
Goals in general:
- Some containers need to expose ports on the LAN.
- Some containers need to expose ports via Tailscale.
- Some containers need to broadcast on the LAN (DLNA stuff) – but I don’t want them broadcasting to Tailscale.
- Generally speaking I’d like to explicitly control what’s exposed from each container on either LAN or Tailscale.
- I’d like to avoid hacking images with Dockerfile. I can make my own images to do stuff, just don’t want to keep up with hacking other images.
How I progresed with Tailscale:
- First tried running it directly on the host. Good: tailnet IP (let’s call it
100.64.0.2
) available on the host’s default network stack. Containers can use “ports:” to map to100.64.0.2
(tailscale) and/or10.0.0.2
(LAN). Bad: tailscale would mess with/etc/resolv.conf
on host. Also bad: tailscale0 on host picked up stuff that binds to0.0.0.0
. - Moved tailscale to a container running on the host network stack (
network_mode: host
). Made it leave/etc/resolv.conf
alone. tailscale0 on host stack still picks up everything on0.0.0.0
.
This is kinda where I’m stuck. I can make the tailscale container bridged which would put the tailscale0 interface inside the container. It wouldn’t pick up 0.0.0.0
from host but how would I publish ports to it?
- The tailscale recommended way of doing it is by putting other containers in the tailscale’s container network stack (
network_mode: container:tailscale
). This would prevent said containers from using “ports:” to map to host anymore. Also, everything they publish locally would end up on tailscale0 whether I like it or not. - Tailscale has an env var TS_DEST_IP that can mirror another IP. I could allocate an IP on host eth0 like
10.1.1.1
, mirror that from the tailscale container, and target it from other containers explicitly with “ports:” when I want to publish a port to tailscale. Downside:10.1.1.1
would be in the host’s network stack so still picks up0.0.0.0
. - I could bridge the tailscale container with other containers on a private subnet, say
192.168.1.0/24
and usetailscale serve
to forward specific ports to other containers over that subnet. Unfortunatelyserve
is fairly limited; it can’t do UDP and technically it refuses to forward TCP either to non-localhost (but you can dump the serve config to JSON, and hack that config, and use it withTS_SERVE_CONFIG=
🤮). - I could bridge tailscale with other containers and create a special container with a fixed IP on that subnet, mirror the IP from tailscale, and use iptables on that container to forward specific ports to other containers. This would actually solve everything I want except…
- If I ever want to use another VPN which doesn’t have the mirror feature. I don’t know how I’d deal with that.
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