it’s all good! Just wanted to share my experience with this tech. I am not a networking expert at all - just a tinkerer and a lifehacker who is a sucker for simple and elegant solutions. I am not above putting in some elbow grease when necessary though (like when I had to painstakingly modify coffeescript code in my Ubersicht widgets to make them just right without knowing anything about coffeescript haha)
I think so. I am a pretty big fan of SMB. You are not opening up your home server to the internet - you can only access Tailscale-specific IP addresses of your devices once you are connected to your tailnet (for that, they have 2FA). This is in stark contrast to solutions like ngrok where your traffic is routed through a server and no VPN encryption is required to make a connection (in Tailscale’s case, a WireGuard tunnel). Also, ngrok throttles traffic quite a bit… A few people on here raised objections to the use of a third party for authentication, as is most commonly done in Tailscale, but I don’t really concern myself with the pitfalls of that. I feel like getting a VPS to handle authentication yourself is overkill for me.
Those solutions might be better if you have the ability to open up your router’s ports, which I do not. Trust me if I was the network admin, I would want to host my own NAS to share my movie collection with my friends, but for now, Tailscale at least allows me to access my collection myself remotely
Haha if I was affiliated with them, I would not be talking about my collection of torrented material LOL
They are pretty darn good and versatile once you get rid of all the bloatware and ads, and remap the remote buttons. For instance, with AirReceiver installed, they become as good as an appleTV for screen mirroring (mac and iphone). Also, the ability to seamlessly sideload is paramount for me, which is why I will never own an appleTV. I remapped my app buttons to the apps I want, as well as the home button to Wolf Launcher and it’s mint now. I keep Tailscale running continuously on both of my firesticks.
I used to bring my firestick along for the ride when I travel, but these days, I just run Wolf Launcher through Samsung DeX on my S10+. With the right settings, it does everything the firestick can do and more.
The speed is pretty good - I can watch 1080p mkv video stored on my server with no issues at all when I’m in Europe (my server is in Canada). I tried watching 4K and didn’t encounter any stuttering either.
So the thing is, my dad pays for Bell Fibe Internet and TV and when I am on LAN, I can watch all the channels that the subscription includes from virtually ANY device (firesticks, iphones, androids, laptops, etc.) either by downloading the Bell Fibe TV app from the appstore or by going to https://tv.bell.ca/home. Bell detects automatically that I am connected to the internet through them, as well as my dad’s subscription (no need to log in or anything). I can trick Bell into thinking that I am at home by running a funnel on my server with the help of Tailscale. Now, when I am away from home, the app will only work when I am on wifi AND connected to Tailscale AND using my server at the exit node (funnel). If I am on cellular, I have to use the website I mentioned earlier. The best browsers for that are Samsung Internet on android and Grazing 3 on iOS, since they allow the picture to fill the entire screen. In principle, you should be able to access your subscription from any device that has a web browser and can run Tailscale.