Bridging your networks

 So I have two locations that I want connecting and, in this mobile world (COVID notwithstanding), I need to connect to either or both.  Say hello to Tailscale!

For a single account (person) you can join up to 20 devices together for free.  A marvellous solution that runs on mobile platforms, Windows, Linux, Synology and more.  It’s actually so excellent, I have installed it onto a Linux machine on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and SSH into a port not exposed to the Internet on one of my free tier VPS machines!

I am currently at 14 machines on Tailscale as I bring in my VMs either at home or in OCI to Tailscale – because it makes such good sense.That’s not the only beneficial open source / freemium software I’m using, though.  I am syncing to network storage in two locations with one end running Syncthing on Synology and the other Syncthing on Windows.

Both of these solutions bypass NAT (and CG-NAT) to route traffic at another layer; both offer isolation and/or encryption and both come at a really good price (free) for low usage customers.