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Show HN: TailGuard – Bridge your WireGuard router into Tailscale via a container

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149 points juhovh | 3 comments | 10 Sep 25 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.005s | source

My elderly parents are behind a 5G connection in rural areas, and I help them manage their network from overseas. I found a reasonably priced 5G router that can do external antennas required for it to work, but the only reasonable ways to get access to it is either through OpenVPN or WireGuard, the latter of which is much more lightweight and preferred with the memory constraints of the device.

The problem with WireGuard is that it requires handling key management oneself, and configuring the keys to every device you want to access it from. It also doesn't play nicely together with other VPNs, meaning I ended up connecting and disconnecting VPNs whenever I wanted to use them. This is especially evident on my phone, which only allows one VPN app at a time.

I was already using Tailscale as an easy way to handle homelab access with SSO, even if some computers are behind ISP CGNAT, and came up with this idea of spinning up a Docker container to connect the two. I found some suggestions for it online, but nothing ready to use. It ended up being more work than I expected to fine tune the routing, IPv6, firewall settings, re-resolving the DNS of the router on IP address changes etc.

I got it very stable eventually though, and wanted to share with everyone else. I think it's cool to have the WireGuard router looking like any other Tailscale node in my tailnet now.

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notadeveloper ◴[10 Sep 25 15:36 UTC] No.45199253[source]▶
What about the Subnet Router functionality that Tailscale has?
replies(2): >>45199317 #>>45199723 #
1. juhovh ◴[10 Sep 25 16:05 UTC] No.45199723[source]▶
This is using the subnet router functionality of Tailscale. However, instead of advertising subnets of the local physical network, as explained in the Tailscale docs, it's automatically parsing the given WireGuard config and advertising the subnets at the other end of the WireGuard tunnel.

It will also by default route traffic to the already advertised other subnets in the tailnet, but taking that into use requires a bit of manual configuration on the other end of the WireGuard tunnel. Each subnet needs to be routed through the WireGuard tunnel first to make it work.

replies(1): >>45200894 #
2. benley ◴[10 Sep 25 17:24 UTC] No.45200894[source]▶
Interesting - this could actually be good functionality to add to tailscale-manager (https://github.com/singlestore-labs/tailscale-manager), which currently just handles AWS prefix lists and DNS lookups.
replies(1): >>45201524 #
3. juhovh ◴[10 Sep 25 18:06 UTC] No.45201524[source]▶
Thank you, wasn't aware of this project, but it makes total sense!

Managing the advertised subnets manually is a bit of a pain, while the downsides of accidentally advertising a subnet are negligible, since you still have full control over them in the Tailscale console.