Tailscale

3 Articles

A black screen with green text is shown. The green text logs events from a VPN gateway.

Running A VPN Gateway On An ESP32

May 18, 2026 by 23 Comments

If you need a VPN gateway to access your home network, the fastest and most cost-effective way is probably by using a Raspberry Pi Zero. But in [Samir Makwana]’s view, an ESP32-S3 is just as capable for moderate use, and in some respects even superior.

This was possible thanks to the MicroLink project, which is a full implementation of a Tailscale client for the ESP32 family. In some ways the ESP32 worked better than a Raspberry Pi: it boots in two seconds rather than thirty, draws 0.5 Watts rather than 1.5, and there’s no chance of it failing due to a corrupted SD card. Compared to a Raspberry Pi, however, which can be set up as a Tailscale client in a few minutes, this took several hours to get running. The biggest issue was making sure that there was enough memory available for TLS handshakes, which was solved by enabling the ESP32’s PSRAM.

Once the VPN client is running, the ESP32 can be used as an SSH jump machine to access other devices on the home network, without needing to expose those machines to the open Internet. The ESP32 also hosts an HTTP server which can send a wake-on-LAN magic packet to another device on the local network, letting unused devices sleep without impairing their availability.

The ESP32 doesn’t provide much bandwidth — streaming video would cause issues — but it works well enough for lightweight applications. If you’re wanting to stream video from an ESP32, though, it is technically possible.

Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk

March 6, 2026 by 23 Comments

Can you remotely unlock an encrypted hard disk? [Jyn] needed to unlock their home server after it rebooted even if they weren’t home. Normally, they used Tailscale to remote in, but you can’t use tailscale to connect to the machine before the hard drive decrypts, right? Well, you can, sort of, and [Jyn] explains how.

The entertaining post points out something you probably knew, but never thought much about. When your Linux box boots, it starts a very tiny compressed Linux in RAM. On [Jyn’s] machine using Arch, this is the initramfs.

That’s not news, but because it is an actual limited Linux system (including systemd), you can add tools to it. In this case, adding dropbear (an ssh server) and Tailscale to the limited boot-time Linux.

Continue reading “Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk” →

Linux Fu: Easy And Easier Virtual Networking

June 14, 2023 by 15 Comments

One of the best things about Linux is that there are always multiple ways to do anything you want to do. However, some ways are easier than others. Take, for example, virtual networking. There are plenty of ways to make a bunch of Internet-connected computers appear to be on a single private network. That’s nothing new, of course. Linux and Unix have robust networking stacks. Since 2018, though, Wireguard has been the go-to solution; it has a modern architecture, secure cryptography, and good performance.

There’s only one problem: it is relatively difficult to set up. Not impossible, of course. But it is a bit difficult, depending on what you want to accomplish.

How Difficult?

You must set up a wireguard server and one or more clients. You’ll need to pick a range of IP addresses. You might need to turn on routing. You have to generate keys. You might need to configure DNS and other routing options. You’ll certainly need to modify firewall rules. You’ll also need to distribute keys.

None of these steps are terribly difficult, but it is a lot to keep straight. The wg program and wg-quick script do most of the work, but you have a lot of decisions and configuration management to keep straight.

Browse the official “quick start,” and you’ll see that it isn’t all that quick. The wg-quick script is better but only handles some use cases. If you want really limited use cases, there are third-party tools to do a lot of the rote work, but if you need to change anything, you’ll still need to figure it all out.

That being said, once you have it set up, it pretty much works without issue and works well. But that initial setup can be very frustrating. Continue reading “Linux Fu: Easy And Easier Virtual Networking” →