How annoying is it to connect to VPN/use Tailscale instead of being able to access the service directly?

Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 34 points –

So I'm just being introduced to the concept of using a VPN or something like Tailscale to access one's services, instead of opening the services directly to the web, but I'm thinking for streaming purposes or just accessing your services on the run, isn't it an annoyance having to connect to your home network all the time? Or do you keep the VPN running on your phone for example? What if you use a VPN provider for privacy purposes, wouldn't one need to then switch VPN connection?

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For an external VPN like mullvad, I run my own proxy. Again it's only available from my VPN or inside my network.

It uses socks5 and gluetun docket containers and in apps that support proxies, I can add my proxy to it and it'll route that traffic through the paid VPN.

Or, a work profile (see shelter) or androids new private spaces. If you have private spaces, it uses a seperate network. So if you have a VPN installed outside the private space, it won't work on apps inside the space. So, what you could do is have a paid VPN inside private spaces, and use it and a web browser or whatever there, and use your server's VPN outside the private space.

Lmk if you want any of my docker composes

Very interesting. Didn't know this was a possibility. I don't need anything now but thanks for offering, might get back to you

This sounds very interesting. I always wondered if I could use a paid VPN together with Tailscale or Netbird. But I'm not sure I understood how you set this up. And what are Android private spaces?

I have gluetun+socks5 containea running, then in an app, I put in localip:port into a proxy field. Then that app will use that connection for internet. Browsers on desktop also support proxies. So if you want a specific browser to always use the VPN, this is a very simple way to do that.

https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/private-space

Thank you for pushing me into the rabbit hole. But gluetun already has a socks proxy server built in, if I read that correctly on their github.