I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al.
The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devices can talk to my home server from anywhere in the world without the risk of exposing any ports on it directly to the internet.
Being able to hit my home server directly from my iPhone via a tailnet no matter where in the world my iPhone might be is really cool.
I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
Ideal if you have the resources (time, money, expertise). There are different levels of qualifications, convenience, and trust that shape what people can and will deploy. This defines where you draw the line - at owning every binary of every service you use, at compiling the binaries yourself, at checking the code that you compile.
> I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports
It's simple, you increase your attack surface, and the effort and expertise needed to mitigate that.
> It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
Along with no passwords or security. There's no prescribed way for how to use the internet. If you're serving one person or household rather than the whole internet, then why expose more than you need out of some misguided principle about the internet? Principle of least privilege, it's how security is meant to work.
Sure, but opening up one port is a much smaller surface than exposing yourself to a whole cloud hosting company.
If your threat model includes "OpenSSH might have an RCE" then "Tailscale might have an RCE" belongs there too.
If you are exposing a handful of hardened services on infrastructure you control, Tailscale adds complexity for no gain. If you are connecting machines across networks you do not control, or want zero-config access to internal services, then I can see its appeal.
These days, that seems insane.
As the traffic grew, as speeds increased, licensing became necessary.
I think, these days, we're almost into that category. I don't say this happily. But having unrestricted access seems like an era coming to an end.
I realise this seems unworkable. But so was the idea of a driver's license. Sometimes society and safety comes first.
I'm willing to bet that in under a decade, something akin to this will happen.
The point of a driver's license is that driving a ton of steel around at >50mph presents risk of harm to others.
Not knowing how to use a computer - driving it "poorly" - does not risk harm to others. Why does it merit restriction, based on the topic of this post?
It’s why Cloudflare exists, which in itself is another form of harm, in centralising a decentralised network.
1. "Unpatched servers become botnet hosts" - true, but Tailscale does not prevent this. A compromised machine on your tailnet is still compromised. The botnet argument applies regardless of how you access your server.
2. Following this logic, you would need to license all internet-connected devices: phones, smart TVs, IoT. They get pwned and join botnets constantly. Are we licensing grandma's router?
3. The Cloudflare point undermines the argument: "botnets cause centralization (Cloudflare), which is harm", so the solution is... licensing, which would centralize infrastructure further? That is the same outcome being called harmful.
4. Corporate servers get compromised constantly. Should only "licensed" corporations run services? They already are, and they are not doing better.
Back to the topic: I have no clue what you think Tailscale is, but it does increase security, only convenience.