Good bot

Yeah I swapped over to ProtonVPN after they dropped support for port forwarding. Shame really because I did really enjoy Mullvad's VPN service.

Yes, exactly that.
I use it to SSH into my devices all the time.

I don't really use it for this, but here are some things I do use it for:

• metrics scraping on servers without needing to open ports or worry about ssl encryption. Works great for federating Prometheus instances or scraping exporters
• secure access to machines not directly exposed to the internet. I.e. ssh access to my home box while I'm traveling
• being an exit node for web traffic while traveling. I.e. maybe you are traveling and have a bank who is giving you grief about logging in -- masquerade that connection from your home IP

I mostly just use it for metrics scraping though

Plex probably isn't the best example, but yes, you can use Tailscale to create a sort of mesh network to access devices within private networks. Essentially any device that's connected to tailscale can be contacted by other clients connected to tailscale. There are extra routing things you can do to use a tailscale device as a sort of "exit node", but that's the basic gist.

Not Plex, but yes. I use it with Microsoft Remote Desktop if I need to access a work-related computer that I keep at home while traveling.

I also use it for the more typical use case of a cloud server that I can ssh into even though it exposes zero ports publicly.

It's accessing literally anything you self host from home, with minimal latency and without any port forwarding on your router or exposing your services to the Internet.

It's primary benefit is how fast it is, how much easier it is to set up for even the most novice of users, and how ubiquitous all the clients are.

Plus it's free for 100 endpoints, which is far more than most individuals will need for home labs. And even that you can get around by using subnet routing.

If you've ever wanted to run your own sort of Dropbox or Google docs (Syncthing/Next cloud) but didn't want to deal with the security hassle of exposing it to the Internet, this removes that completely. No more struggling with open ports, fail2ban, or messing with reverse proxies.

I use it to reach all of my services when I go out.

I’ve audiobooks, RSS, music, and cloud.

I use tailscale with next dns, it works great. I don't use magic DNS, however, but it's a trade off I'm okay with for the benefit of blocking at the edge

As an aside, I wish technical documents like this would stop saying "Wireguard client" and "Wireguard server". Wireguard doesn't have clients and servers - everyone is a peer, and whether you can route through the peer or not is just based on the routing table and nftables/iptables rules.

You can also achieve this with any VPN by using two Docker containers:

1. Gluetun: https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun
2. Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/kb/1282/docker/

Set Gluetun up to connect to your VPN (they support a huge number of providers) and then set the Tailscale container to use the Gluetun's network. Then, use that Tailscale container as your exit node.

You can also combine this with a self-hosted Headscale (https://github.com/juanfont/headscale) instance.

I think it's diminished, yes. Regardless of whatever PR spin they might pull, I don't think there's any way around it.

What does port forwarding gain you on a VPN? Sorry if the question is ignorant

I just it with protonVPN on Linux with no issue.

I don't know about exit node on Tailscale because I don't use it but the rest is working absolutely fine.