philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club My understanding was tailscale is to connect different machines across the internet, but that a traditional VPN hides your information
You got it! When you google VPN services, you get all these companies selling products for encrypting your internet traffic (90% snake oil IMHO). Main usecase nowadays seems to be making your browsing appear like you are in a different country. This is not what people are referring to in this thread by “VPN”, even though it is the exact same underlying technology.
Tailscale is actually trying to simplify the original VPN idea, which is to create a secure private “network” over the internet, so your devices can securely talk to one another, no matter where they are physically (over the internet). When you are out on the road, your phone can see your home server just like they were on the same home network, and there’s no way for an attacker to see the traffic or get access to those machines. You might also read about Wireguard or Zerotier -same idea, the first is more rudimentary but is used by Tailscale, the second is their main compeditor. Tailscale is pretty good at being easy to get going because it takes care of authentication, routing, and port forwarding for you. They even helpfully proxy your encrypted traffic if the machines fully cannot p2p we each other (slow, but can save your butt). The apps are pretty decent too. I used Tailscale for a long time then eventually self-hosted it once I knew what I was doing sufficiently. I still use their apps.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Yes, mobile devices typically cannot run two VPNs at once. There are two issues here, when at home and when out on other networks.
At home, the solution is not to round-trip out to your VPN provider and then back into your network via the public Internet using your domain. Unfortunately. That creates a huge latency and bandwidth penalty when you are physically at home and unnecessary complexity.
Instead, if you must use your VPN service while at home, you need to find the split tunnel settings to allow your phone to access the local network while connected to the VPN service. They usually hide that setting because it opens up the security of said services and allows some leaks, but it should be there.
When out on other networks, it gets harder. If you get creative with networking, you could connect a computer to your commercial VPN service and have all your tailnet devices use it as an exit node, which has the nice benefit of paying the VPN service for “one device” and using as many as you want, but is dependent on your home network speed and a PITA to set up.
Tailscale does integrate with one VPN provider so you can use one app for both tasks, but it may not be the provider you want. I don’t know If their direct competitors do the same, maybe shop around a bit. One VPN app for both use cases is what you want, not two different VPN apps.
Finally, if none of the above works for you, then yes, you are back to accessing your self-hosted services via the public internet and your domain name while travelling and using your commercial VPN. You will have to secure the service, and that will take some learning to do safely. That will be a journey and not something you want to just throw together quickly. You might be able to restrict incoming connections to just your commercial VPN IP address range (in addition to all of the other proper config required) to further reduce the attack surface. Sorry, that is a bit of bad news.