I’m wondering if I’m starting to outgrow Tailscale… my wife keeps having networking issues on Android due to Tailscale, the Nvidia Shield kills the Tailscale app randomly, and my parents’ TV doesn’t have a Tailscale app…
I feel like the time is approaching to publicly expose some of my services to the internet…
Any other tips?
I’ve had to stop using it on my Pixel. In the last few months I have more and more suddenly lost all connectivity outside of my tailscale network. I tried excluding apps but I still will randomly fail to receive SMS or calls, suddenly getting them delivered in a rush when I disconnect from tailscale.
If anyone has any tools to recommend troubleshooting the phones connection let me know. I have no idea how to learn more about the problem beyond the obvious “If tailscale isn’t on, it doesn’t happen.”
GAAH! OK! I’M NOT CRAZY!
The exact same thing is happening to my wife’s phone. We’re both on Pixel 8s, have the same VPN settings, but for some magic reason Tailscale breaks only her phone. She has to turn off Tailscale and reboot her phone to regain connectivity.
These shenanigans is why I’m considering just exposing things to the public internet. I’m using Tailscale on several device types and Tailscale adds friction to all of my devices (except Arch where everything always works).
I understand the friction is there for a good reason, but my family doesn’t. They just see that Jellyfin doesn’t work and that all of this is buggy and maybe they just should sign up for Netflix instead of dealing with all of these bugs.
Yeah, I had a overall bad experience with everything being buggy and then even devices that weren’t connected to tailscale would start trying to ping the tailnet address instead of the local (wasn’t using their funky bridge subnets feature or whatever it’s called, so I don’t know why it would happen).
Their magicDNS is cool in theory but caused me nothing but problems. Once I turned off their DNS and set up my own DNS server for it though, it’s gotten to basically be as seamless as they claim it’s supposed to be from the start. I’m no longer having any issues with it at all.
I’ve had a pretty good experience with it aside from this recent problem with my phone - Pixel 8 Pro. It’s a big deal right now - I have a number of self hosted services I use on my phone accessed through a shared subnet via tailscale. When I left it enabled, multiple times a day I’d lose connectivity entirely. It would get fixed if I just quickly disable-enable it… at least until it randomly happens again in an hour or two. I started using spit tunneling, which I think fixed the connectivity issue for internet-dependent apps but nothing I tried fixed calls and texts.
Unfortunately, my mother has been having a number of health issues so there is no fucking way I’m going to risk missing calls and texts…so I just deal with being disconnected from my servers for now. I really wish there was a solution or something I could do to figure out what’s going wrong. I can’t keep trying random things and risk it. Calls from my mother are virtually the only calls I get, other than spam.
I think that’s a known issue, but the last time I looked there didn’t seem to be a known cause or a fix.