I've had a personal finance application running at home for a while now, and I've struggled a bit with the best way to make it accessible to both myself and Madeline with minimal fuss and inconvenience.

🔗Tailscale

I'm currently connecting to it with Tailscale using a custom tailnet subdomain. This has some upsides and some downsides:

🔗Upsides

  • Accessible with a semi-memorable DNS record and no port (summer.tailXXXXX.ts.net).
  • No fiddling with caddy/letsencrypt/custom root certificates.
  • SSL connection basically for free.
  • Easy access whether inside or outside my home network.

🔗Downsides

  • Not as good a DNS name as a fully custom setup allows (e.g. summer.lan).
  • Have to run the Tailscale app/service on any devices that want to connect.

Tailscale does have a feature called MagicDNS that allows you to connect via a short name, e.g. summer. This works, however I haven't yet figured out how to get SSL going with it since the TLS certificate doesn't match. Overall I think it's still better to use the fully qualified name and get the upsides mentioned.

I know Tailscale has some mechanism to share a service or tailnet with another user, but I haven't figured that part out yet and just signed into my account on Madeline's devices. I should peruse the sharing docs and do this properly in the future, maybe with a follow-up blog post.

🔗More Services

Since this worked pretty well I decided to try setting up a couple more services, notably copyparty and ZenNotes as potential replacements for Google Drive and Apple Notes, respectively. I hope to write about those experiments here whether they work out or not. They now have their own tailnet subdomains for easy access.

Tailscale also has their own (alpha) feature called Taildrive that theoretically allows accessing file shares on other devices. I may try that out as well.