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

(github.com)
149 points juhovh | 2 comments | 10 Sep 25 03:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.025s | 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.

1. jasonriddle ◴[10 Sep 25 16:24 UTC] No.45199990[source]▶
So, it looks like this might work with fly.io?

fly.io provides a way to connect to their servers via wireguard (https://fly.io/docs/blueprints/connect-private-network-wireg...), and so tailguard could connect to their wireguard instance?

replies(1): >>45200098 #
2. juhovh ◴[10 Sep 25 16:30 UTC] No.45200098[source]▶
Not super familiar with fly.io, but with a quick look at that page it should work just fine.

Just instead of dropping that camellia.conf to the WireGuard MacOS client or Linux wg-quick, spin up the TailGuard container somewhere (pretty much anywhere, but with good ping to fly.io). That way you should have the fly.io private network accessible in your Tailscale tailnet, it runs wg-quick internally alongside Tailscale anyway, just with a bit of scripting to automatically configure the network and the firewall to avoid connections leaking.

If it doesn't work, feel free to raise an issue and I can have a look.