I’ve spent too many hours googling this stuff without a solution in sight that I’m able to understand.
I am moderately new to selfhosting, especially the networking aspect. To put it simply, all I want is to be able to access my services through Tailscale by using subdomain.mydomain.com.
I have gotten so far to point my domain to my Tailscale IP (using Cloudflare’s DNS), so that I don’t have to copy paste the Tailscale IP, but that means I still have to type in the ports to the services. Between the posts saying Tailscale can handle this, to the ones saying Synology can do it, and the remaining posts saying to use a reverse proxy (and the ones saying reverse proxy are a bad idea because of Synology stuff) I am now very lost. The terminology is exhausting and everyone is already so knowledgeable that they skip the basic steps and go straight to complex, short answers.
I’d like to keep using Tailscale, as I don’t want to deal with security issues and SSL certificates and all that, and if possible I’d like to avoid using a reverse proxy such as npm or Caddy if there’s a built in Tailscale/Synology solution that works.
To me more services just means more stuff that can break, and I really just want this stuff to work without fiddling with it.
Thanks for any help you can provide
Tailscale has a feature which assigns you a random network subdomain off ts.net. You can use it to find any system by name. But also you don’t need it. You can usually just access the services via the host name if your client is attached to tailscale and also has open ACLs for the services you are accessing. as far as i know there is no way to do what you are trying to do and I’m not sure why you are trying to do it. if you are trying to make a service public you probably want to use something like cloudflared instead.
If your goal is to expose a web server to the internet I recommend you use cloudflare zero trust and create a tunnel. This would solve any ssl certificate issues and would also get rid of the need to use any kind of reverse proxy as cloudflare would be acting as a reverse proxy. There are other options of course but this is the simplest for web based services.
If your goal is to simply be able to reach the NAS remotely over the internet you don’t need to open ports or use reverse proxies. You can simply access it internally via the tailscale grid just as if it were local to you like on a LAN. As long as your client is on the same tailscale net as the NAS and has open ACLs this will work fine. It’s sort of unclear to me as to what your actual goal is.
Another option again assuming your goal is to access the synology NAS via the public internet. You could use synology built in quick connect service and that would get it done.
If at some point you find a way to articulate your actual goal let me know and I may have a better option for you.
Thanks for the answers. I guess that was not clear from my post, but I do not want to expose anything to the internet. All I want to do is tidy up the urls to the services for clarity. I have no issue with installing Tailscale on every device I want to access my services with. I can currently access any service just fine by doing “tailscaleIP:PortOfService”, but that is kind of unpractical. So by using my domain and Cloudflare DNS I changed it to “mydomain.com:PortOfService” which is already better, but means I have to look up what port the service I need uses. Like I said in my post I’d ideally like “nameOfService.mydomain.com”, no ports. And yes I realize this is purely for convenience/aesthetic reasons. Apologies if my words are not clear enough.
Ok so I guess what I’m confused about then is why you didn’t use Tailscale MagicDNS which is already integrated and used for this purpose.
https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns
In a similar vein you may also find this helpful:
https://tailscale.com/kb/1281/app-connectors
https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel
https://xyproblem.info/