Selfhosted

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

Yeah, unfortunately because of this decision from Mullvad, they also lost me as customer and I had to move to another.

It kinda sucks because I loved Mullvad. They had great servers, customer service, and I do like their Android & Linux program.

Did they change something? I've been port forwarding for a couple of years now.

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.

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.

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

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

I don't know what's up on your case, but I would not jump to the conclusion that it's impossible to use tailscale with any other VPN in any circumstance.

Rather, tailscale and Mullvad will now work easily and out of the box. For other VPNs, you may need to do understand the topology and routing of virtual devices and have the technical ability and system permissions to make deep networking changes.

So I'd expect one can probably find a way for most things to coexist on a Linux server. On a non-rootrr android phone? I'm less confident.

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.

In Tailscale you can set up an exit node which lets you access the entire internet via its internet connection.

You could set up an exit node that would let you access the internet via some (anonymizing) VPN providers like Mullvad or any other.

This sounds like Tailscale is simply setting up this exit node for Mullvad on their side and providing it as a service. So it's not like using another VPN anonymizers is impossible, it's just convenient to use Mullvad.