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Apple TV, now with more Tailscale
- sohrob 3y agoAwesome news and boosts the utility of the Apple TV tremendously.
- FireBeyond 3y agoI don't care either way, but I did note the ignorance of the elephant in the room as to why 99% of people would care about Tailscale and native VPN support on their Apple TV... and it's not "avoiding sketchy wifi networks".
- fotta 3y ago> With a Tailscale exit node, you’re in control and you get the internet connection you’re used to. This new feature could come in handy if you’re traveling with your Apple TV and want to access the same geo-restricted channels you can see from home. They do call this out towards the end.
- cassianoleal 3y agoHow's this supposed to work? If I'm travelling with my Apple TV and use it as an exit node, it's as geo-restricted as I am, wherever I am.
- ezfe 3y agoThis blog post isn't just for using it as an exit node. Traveling with the Apple TV and using Tailscale lets you exit-node back to your house. Traveling without the Apple TV and the exit-node can be your Apple TV.
- cassianoleal 3y agoPerhaps the blog post isn't, but the quoted text is: > With a Tailscale exit node, you’re in control and you get the internet connection you’re used to. This new feature could come in handy if you’re traveling with your Apple TV and want to access the same geo-restricted channels you can see from home.
- ezfe 3y agoYes, but the tail scale exit node referenced in that quote isn't necessarily the Apple TV.
- Larrikin 3y agoYou designated a device at home as the exit node and are using that on your Apple TV in a different location.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoBecause say I want to connect to my own private remote network. I have a server hosted in a datacenter because I self-host. I'd much rather have VPN capabilities than deal with a proxy server and publicly open ports with rules. This is a much tighter way to do things, IMHO.
- LoganDark 3y agoIt's a way to access it remotely without having to forward a port to the whole world. There are other ways to do this, but a VPN is usually the most straightforward option. It's also a way to proxy your connections through a device at home, of course. Whether the Apple TV is the client or the exit node.
- meowtimemania 3y agoThe main use case I see is sharing streaming services like youtube TV with family.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoYou can already do that officially... but maybe not region-locked sports
- drewnick 3y agoDefinitely not region locked sports. My YT TV account is based on the other side of the country and I can't watch our local teams quite frequently. I've been using wireguard and a dedicated wifi network to tunnel through a fiber connection "back home" and it then thinks I am local and all works well. This is much cleaner with tailscale!
- sangnoir 3y agoIt's cheaper if everyone is in the "same household" (i.e. sharing the same public IP as main account)
- zikduruqe 3y agoI run my own DNS server at home, and have Tailscale installed on it also. I use this so when I am away from home, I can continue to use it via Tailscale and/or an exit node for full on VPN-like solution. I can now, move Tailscale off that server, and put it on my Apple TV to use as my network for my DNS server when I am away from the house.
- copperx 3y agoFor sharing Netflix accounts?
- fragmede 3y agoArrr, it not be for Netflix.
- tredre3 3y agoTailscale isn't useful for piracy. Unless you really want your pirate traffic to always be routed through your home?
- ezfe 3y agoTailscale has Mullvad integration now, so it can be used that way too
- tshaddox 3y agoThe idea is that you host all your pirated media from home, e.g. on a NAS running Plex or Jellyfin, and your home server can stream any of your media to any device (including transcoding it to best fit the device and connection). Tailscale isn't particularly useful for acquiring the pirated media in the first place, of course.
- stirlo 3y ago
- unstatusthequo 3y agoThis is great news! Not only does this make a remote Plex / Jellyfin media server easier to deal with, the Apple TV can be an exit node. Solid work, TailScale!
- maxmcd 3y agoI'm a little unfamiliar with how Plex routing works. Would this make it so that your plex connected media servers don't need to be publicly routabel and the Plex app will know to connect through the tailscale network? Would you need to reconfigure plex to use the tailscale ip addresses and then the Apple TX Plex app will stream over that address?
- aaomidi 3y agoDepends on how you’ve setup Plex, but you can give it custom access URLs. So you can expose both a public and a private endpoint. Or just a private endpoint, up to you really.
- ecliptik 3y agoI wrote up a guide [1] on using Plex + Tailscale + HTTPS last year to setup Plex so you don't have to expose it through the Plex relays or setup port forwards for other devices on a Tailnet. I would assume with this announcement, you can keep Plex private to your Tailnet and an AppleTV also on the Tailnet could use it without any port fowarding. 1. https://forums.plex.tv/t/remote-access-using-tailscale-magicdns-and-https/799941 https://forums.plex.tv/t/remote-access-using-tailscale-magic...
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago>setup port forwards for other devices on a Tailnet. Ah. Now I get it.
- Operyl 3y agoUsing it as an always-on exit node is actually a pretty nifty feature, I hadn’t thought about that as a viable feature before now.
- cube2222 3y agoThis is by the way kind of how remote access with apple home works. The Apple TV serves as a local gateway relaying all the commands to your local IoT devices. On a side note, tailscale is lovely. I have nothing but good things to say about them.
- Operyl 3y agoYup, either a HomePod, Apple TV, or iPad left at home can act as a HomeKit hub.
- ericswpark 3y agoJust an FYI, but iPads can no longer be used as a HomeKit hub as of last year: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213481 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213481 (Yes, you can technically use an iPad as a hub if you are on the old Home architecture)
- Operyl 3y agoGood change, then! It wasn’t a great experience for most people. iPads are rarely static home fixtures now, and they were the only ones capable of dying.
- drcongo 3y agoYeah, that was always a weird choice. The one time I went on holiday without first checking to see which device was acting as my primary home hub it turned out to be my iPad, which I'd taken with me, and all my security cameras were "unavailable" for the week. I'm sure the system is supposed to just switch to a different primary hub in that situation (I have about 15 candidates), but it didn't.
- judge2020 3y ago> Finally, the new Tailscale client allows an Apple TV to be an exit node itself for other machines in your tailnet. Pretty huge. Many non-techy users don't like the idea of keeping a computer on 24/7, but a smart TV is just fine. Also, the Apple TV 4k only draws 0.5 watts at idle and less than 3 watts when streaming movies[0], so I imagine it pulls less than 1 just tunnelling traffic. Computers pull 15W+ at idle, and that's with low end components. 0: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/appletv/Apple_TV_4K_PER_Oct2022.pdf#page=9 https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/appletv/Apple...
- aaomidi 3y agoI had not convinced the use case of using this as an exit node. Fuck this simplified so much.
- copperx 3y agoTailscale also runs on Android TV. If you don't have an Apple TV and want a cheap device just to have an exit node, you can buy a $20 Android TV thingy.
- vosper 3y agoBeware that a lot of cheap Android TV boxes come pre-loaded with heaps of malware. You don't want them in your network. Linus Tech Tips has a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vpepaQ-VQQ&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vpepaQ-VQQ&themeRefresh=1
- copperx 3y agoThat's true. However, Walmart's $20 Onn 4k Streaming Box has no malware, apparently.
- mjs 3y agoIt … kind of does, but if you filter the reviews by "TV" you'll see there's quite a few issues with it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tailscale.ipn https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tailscale..... Not sure why the back button issue hasn't been fixed, that makes it very inconvenient to set up. (Also: are you sure it can be used as an exit node? That wasn't supported a few months ago.)
- nickvanw 3y agoThis is useful - using an exit node with an Apple TV is useful as well for navigating around certain tools that are geo-blocked. Before, you'd have to handle it outside of the device which is much more difficult. I'm going to play around with this later in the week.
- aaomidi 3y agoI’ve been working on bringing tailscale into container networking through a driver, it’s still a work in progress but people might already be interested in trying it out: https://github.com/aaomidi/ContainerScale https://github.com/aaomidi/ContainerScale
- nirav72 3y agoThanks for sharing this. I'm thinking this might be useful to run on a VPS and tie to a reverse proxy container. So I could expose services externally without opening up port on my wan side.
- drexlspivey 3y agoThe bigger news is that you can add VPNs on Apple TV with tvOS 17, I had to run it on my router before
- fmajid 3y agoStill better to run it on your router. Apple’s had VPN leaks, and also exempted its own services from VPN or Little Snitch firewalling. Separation of roles means not having to trust Apple.
- ignoramous 3y agoWait until Apple bundles in 5G eSIMs for connectivity for just Apple apps to bypass the physical firewalls.
- fmajid 3y agoI think SmartTV vendors will get there first.
- Mandatum 3y agoI live reading copy that’s obviously written by nerds. This is the least corporate announcement I’ve seen from a corporation in a long time. No mention of how much they live trust and privacy or how they’re going to make your experience more delightful.
- ant6n 3y agoYeah, sounds like a bunch of tech gobbledigook. I guess it’s written for the users of these services, and they know what all this jargon means.
- cstrahan 3y agoTailscale is a company that provides a VPN (“Virtual Private Network”) service. If you don’t find yourself thinking “man, I really wish this one computer over here could share the same network with that computer over there, despite not being on the same WiFi access point or physical Ethernet network”, then their service (and the news regarding it) aren’t for you. Why would someone want a VPN? There are a bunch, but here are some examples: 1) You want to connect to one of your machines at home while you’re at a coffee shop, or on vacation. Maybe so you can check security cameras, I dunno. 2) You’re on vacation outside of your home country, and you would like to watch a video stream that is blocked in the country you’re vacationing in. I experienced this in the Bahamas — If I recall, I was wanting to watch a UFC fight, but the UFC app refused to stream to the Bahamas (it was this and/or other Disney/Hulu whatever services refusing to play in the Bahamas). By routing traffic through your ISP back home: problem solved. (This what “exit node” is referring to — a computer through which internet traffic flows on your behalf) 3) You want to play a game with a friend that only supports multiplayer play on the same network, but your friend isn’t physically there with you in the same house. So just put the two of you on the same virtual network and now you can play together.
- bawana 3y agobut why is this better than running a vpn client on your pc? For example,when I want to watch streams restricted in my country, I fire up the ExpressVPN client on my laptop, connect to Switzerland, and then my restrictions disappear. Why should get another piece of hardware, wires and complexity (what happens when this box doesnt connect to the internet but it has no keyboard,, display or mouse to guide troubleshooting?)
- mlfreeman 3y agoWill this work with Headscale too?
- angott 3y agoTailscale dev here: yes, you can set up a custom coordination server in the settings, just like on the iOS app. Open the tvOS Settings app, then scroll down to Tailscale.
- hzia 3y agoThank you so much for that!! I wondered about this as well. Love how above and beyond you guys are going to support other OSS implementations <3
- vineyardmike 3y agoGenuine question: Does tail scale want people using headscale? I'm a free-tier personal user, and a little too cheap to give a for-profit corp money when I don't need to just because "I REALLY like the product". If I use headscale does that just cause a headache for the team, or is it good because it reduces traffic to prod? I'm to cheap to pay when I don't need to, but its such a great product (esp for free) that I'd gladly change how I use the product to be less expensive or problematic.
- xeonmc 3y agoIs it possible to transparently embed Tailscale into a game to only talk to your self-hosted Headscale server? Also, is it in theory possible to use WebRTC to negotiate Wireguard connections and not use any control plane?
- bananapub 3y ago> Is it possible to transparently embed Tailscale into a game to only talk to your self-hosted Headscale server? https://github.com/tailscale/libtailscale https://github.com/tailscale/libtailscale > Also, is it in theory possible to use WebRTC to negotiate Wireguard connections and not use any control plane? you can write code to do whatever you want I guess, but that's nothing to do with tailscale
- dimgl 3y agoTailscale continues to be one of the more impressive services I've ever used. Going to install this on my Apple TV immediately. I often travel and use public Wi-Fi, so this is massively useful as my PC and my laptop are not always on (so I can't use them as an exit node). Pretty genius honestly.
- b555 3y agocan anyone share documentation/paper/video with eli5 of tailscale? i recently read this with mulvad too and feel stupid that I don't intuitively understand how it works, and what it does and why it's needed.
- duped 3y agoYou're on a team of 10 people with 20 different machines between you and want to securely send/receive files, spin up servers and talk to them, etc. Tailscale makes this really easy, and fast.
- angott 3y agoThis blog post is a very good technical read (and the diagrams are really cool too): https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/ https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/
- SparkyMcUnicorn 3y agoTailscale is basically wireguard in a seamless UX wrapper, and a bunch of nice (optional) things added on top like ACLs/2FA/MagicDNS/ssh. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/ https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/
- simonw 3y agoIt's WireGuard with a really nice UI. WireGuard is an outstanding mechanism for building secure virtual private networks. You can run WireGuard on a bunch of different machines (or virtual machines) spread all over the world and give them the ability to talk to each other as if they were on the same LAN, with every packet fully encrypted. TailScale has productized this. They wrote software for a bunch of platforms that makes it trivial to connect those machines to your "tailnet" - effectively a WireGuard network which their software manages for you. They tie this to SSO - so you can install their software on your phone and your home server, sign them both in using Google SSO or similar, and now they're able to talk to each other on a secure virtual network. I suggest trying the TailScale setup process to really understand how good it is.
- 3y ago
- syntaxing 3y agoIs it possible to run a plex or jellyfin server on an Apple TV like a Nvidia Shield? If so, I might seriously consider getting an Apple TV just to run as a media server.
- billyhoffman 3y agoSadly an Apple TV can't also be the media server (at least for something like Plex). But just about anything else can run media server, and you can go really low end especially if you don't need it to transcode your media. Some software like Infuse will stream the original media file to the Apple TV, and the transcoding happens on device.
- syntaxing 3y agoI more or less have running every through a N100 and it has been great. Would have been awesome to replace it with an Apple TV though
- hapticmonkey 3y agoAppleTV cant act as a media server. But as a client it's fantastic. An AppleTV with an app like Infuse will flawlessly play back 4K HDR or Dolby Vision videos client side (no transcoding) as well as 7.1 lossless TrueHD audio. Unfortunately it wont do TrueHD Atmos.
- tshaddox 3y agoTrue, but of course if you already have a media server, it can almost certainly already act as a Tailscale exit node.
- zakki 3y agoI wish there is Tailscale for LG TV.
- ilteris 3y agoNever heard of tailscale before. Is it similar to Plex?
- nerdbert 3y agoNope, it's a tool for building a private network among machines which can be geographically and internetically distributed. So, more or less a VPN, but not particularly in the sense that people use it today (which is effectively a glorified proxy server).
- tacticalturtle 3y agoSwitching from WebOS on my LG TV to the Apple TV as the primary interface was honestly one of the best consumer decisions I’ve made this year. LG TVs get slower and more ad- laden with each update.
- miki123211 3y ago> With up to three users available on our Free plan, you’ve got tools to make a media drive available to other trusted people in your life. You can share a collection of family photos and home videos into a faraway relative’s tailnet, without worrying about locking down the server for public internet access. It's important to point out here that, in addition to this, the free plan also lets you send invite links to specific devices, which other people can add on their own accounts. That way, nobody has to go for the (quite expensive and obviously company-focused) free plan, you can share your device with as many friends as you like, and you're not sharing anything else beyond that single device.
- jedberg 3y ago> But even if you don’t have a media server to connect to, you can use Tailscale’s Apple TV app to select another device in your tailnet ... to use as an exit node. This will route all your Apple TV’s traffic through that connection ... making your traffic appear to originate from the machine of your choice. Oh look all of those family Netflix devices are in one home again!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klinquist 3y agoThis makes it much easier to use the Xfinity Stream app on your "travel appletv" :)
- Spooky23 3y agoCan you use this to appear to be in another place for blackout avoidance purposes?
- ShakataGaNai 3y agoThis is very cool, and very useful. For the average, non-technical user, Apple TV as an exit node for other device while traveling is super cool. But for someone who is out of the country for a duration, it's also super handy. Netflix knows all the popular VPN providers and ban hammers them on a regular basis. But being able to use my Apple TV to watch my normal Netflix (or whomever) from any other country... because they think I'm at home? Super win.
- fragmede 3y agoNetwork engineers watching rtt/packet latency very closely can still tell that something fishy is up, but Netflix doesn't really want to block VPNs, they just have to pretend to care enough so that the labels don't pull their content.
- Timber-6539 3y agoI wish they would work on their Android client. Its got a long standing request to add split tunnelling [0] (a standard feature on pretty much every VPN client you'll come across). But it seems in the spirit of re-inventing existing networking technologies, Tailscale also decided to re-invent what a VPN client does. This alone makes me give this otherwise wonderful project a pass despite all the deservingly good press it gets. [0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/6912 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/6912
- lxgr 3y agoThat's amazing! I've already been using it in a very similar way on a Chromecast (the one running Android TV), which made me use my Apple TV less and less, to the point where I actually unplugged it. This might just be its ticket back to an HDMI port :)
- nirav72 3y agowhoa. I'm going to try installing tailscale on the googletv chromecast dongle. Because one of the biggest issues with Chromecast was that it and the device casting from had to be on the same wireless LAN. So when traveling I had to either use a travel router or turn my phone/tablet into an AP. Tailscale might solve that. I already use tailscale for everything else. Just never thought about installing it on Googletv chromecast. Thanks for the suggestion.
- lxgr 3y agoYou still won't be able to actually cast to a Chromecast device unfortunately, since that requires mDNS to work, which only works in the same broadcast domain (i.e. you'd need an L2 VPN, but Tailscale is L3).
- nose-wuzzy-pad 3y agoI’ve installed this on a freshly updated AppleTV 4K with Ethernet and for the life of me I can’t get it to work using the Apple TV as an exit node. I’ve enabled it and approved it in the console. Unfortunately I can’t ping any hosts through it or make any connections. This is in contrast to my other exit node, which is a docker container running tailscaled with user networking. It continues to work just fine. Any ideas? Thanks.
- pomatic 3y agoAre your clients set to use the AppleTV as a gateway? That's a fundamental requirement to ensure the packets your devices send in reply get passed back to the tailscale network.
- nose-wuzzy-pad 3y agoYes, the clients I've attempted this with so far (iPhone running tailscale) I have configured to use the Apple TV as an exit node. When I do so, there is no internet connectivity. When I switch it to another exit node I have in my tailnet it works flawlessly.
- dangoodmanUT 3y agoLOVE THIS
- garyclarke27 3y agoThat's great tvOS now allows VPN - hopefully NordVPN will now release on Apple TV App Store. NordVPN runs great on Amazon Firestick - works for BBC Iplayer and ITVX when you're outside UK.
- Stem0037 3y agoCool! it sounds like a pivotal upgrade, offering both convenience and enhanced security features. I love using Apple TV as the router in my home, when paired with Headscale, it's simply perfect.
- idoescompooters 3y agoThis is pretty awesome, but only makes sense if you've already got an AppleTV. The price difference between the Apple TV and a Raspberry Pi is definitely non-negligible. Also, you probably want the Apple TV with ethernet which is extra $$. Personally, I don't care about TV so I won't be using one anyway. https://kimbroughski.medium.com/how-to-use-a-tailscale-vpn-to-embrace-remote-work-and-explore-the-world-3668481756e9 https://kimbroughski.medium.com/how-to-use-a-tailscale-vpn-t...