Tailscale for my home devices: a short note
Jan 18, 2026
I used to SSH into my home machines through port forwarding on the router, plus a dynamic DNS name that broke every time the ISP rotated my IP. It worked, in the way that things held together with tape work.
Last weekend I finally installed Tailscale on everything: the home server, the Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, my laptop and my phone. Twenty minutes, most of it waiting for installs. Now every device has a stable 100.x address and a MagicDNS name, reachable from anywhere, with nothing exposed to the public internet.
Two things I like more than I expected:
- Taildrop for moving files between phone and laptop without cables or cloud round-trips.
- Using the home Pi-hole as the tailnet DNS, so ad blocking follows me onto coffee shop wifi.
If you still have port 22 open on your home router: this is your sign. It took twenty minutes and I wish I'd done it years ago.