Take control of tailscale with headscale

Tailscale#

Tailscale is a modern tunnel VPN service based on WireGuard® which provides a 'free' and secure means of communication between devices within a tailnet - a private network which Tailscale provides its users.

Essentially, it provides a private and secure way of accessing any of your devices, no matter where you are in the world - a personal WAN encompassing the entire world.

And on top of this, Tailscale is completely free and open-source! At least, on the surface...

Not FOSS? What do you mean?#

There's a quite popular saying within the free and open-source software community, which goes along the lines of:

If you aren't paying for the product, then you are the product.

Which makes perfect sense. It's the modern era so anything significant is powered by some form of modern technology, data is the new oil, and so on. In exchange for offering you 'free' services, companies collect and use your data; while there supposedly are laws in place preventing the inconcensual collection of data in most countries around the world, your personal data may still be traded unethically and inconsensually.

I personally am of the opinion that these laws are worth absolutely nothing if people aren't educated in how their data is being used, and what specifically is being collected. But I digress, and that's a blog post for another time.

I also think it's quite unfortunate that users of paid services still have their personal data collected in the unethical manner outlined above, despite the fact that they are paying for the service...

In the context of Tailscale: while their clients are all open-source, their control server - the thing that's managing and rerouting everything going through what they advertise as your 'secure' VPN, isn't. You've got no idea what this thing is doing with the traffic it recieves.

Headscale#

For every problem, there's probably a solution somewhere. And luckily for this one (which may or may not actually be a problem for you), we've got Headscale as our solution. Headscale's a self-hostable, open-source alternative to the Tailscale control server, and aims to 'provide self-hosters and hobbyists with an open-source server they can use for their projects and labs'.

Installing on NixOS#

Moving on to installing and setting up Headscale on NixOS.

# ...
{
  # ...
  services.headscale = {
    enable = true;
    address = "0.0.0.0";
    port = 7070;
    settings = {
      logtail.enabled = false;
      server_url = "https://headscale.devraza.duckdns.org";
      dns_config.base_domain = "devraza.duckdns.org"; 
    };
  };
  # ...
}

This starts up the headscale systemd service on our host machine at port 7070. After that, we make Headscale available over the clearnet with an NGINX reverse proxy, per the usual:

{
  services.nginx = {
    enable = true;
    virtualHosts = {
      "headscale" = {
        addSSL = true;
        serverName = "headscale.devraza.duckdns.org";
        sslCertificate = ./services/nginx/certs/subdomains/fullchain.pem;
        sslCertificateKey = ./services/nginx/certs/subdomains/privkey.pem;
        # Headscale proxy
        locations."/" = {
          proxyPass = "http://127.0.0.1:${toString config.services.headscale.port}";
          proxyWebsockets = true;
        };
      };
    };
  };
}

And that's it. A self-hosted, truly open-source Wireguard®-based VPN is now at your fingertips. Enjoy! Oh, but please read the conclusion before doing that:

Conclusion#

For those of you who wish to have access to something like Tailscale but value your privacy above all, you would genuinely be greatful for Headscale. However, I've found that some are fine with what Tailscale does provide in regards to FOSS, and are satisfied by the raw convenience and simplicity of a non-selfhosted Tailscale control server - exactly what it hopes to provide, as shown by their self-description on their website: 'a zero-config, no-fuss VPN [provider]'.

Or you could just settle with bare Wireguard®.