If you’ve had a VPS with Hetzner in Europe (very competitive hosting rates) and you’re a Tailscale aficionado you’ve probably used Tailscale and been unhappy with upload/download speeds in kilobytes when connected via Tailscale over SSH. It turns out one reason for the low throughput is that you use pfSense as your firewall, and it can be difficult for Tailscale to punch a hole through pfSense. As a result, it falls back to its DERP servers, which are shared resources for all Tailscale users and often have poor throughput. With that said, here’s a quick change to apply on pfSense to alleviate the problem.
If you’re like me, always running ssh to connect to servers and having to run processes and wanting to know what you ran earlier in one combined session, run tmux. No backgrounding of commands, no using nohup, and even if the ssh session breaks, which most of the time it does if you’re running something that takes a long time, tmux is the best.
If you are a regular user of ssh, you’re aware of some of its issues:
ssh breaks when there’s a disconnection and it doesn’t reconnect. I use tmux as a stopgap so I can go back to what I was doing. typing on ssh terminal when the remote server is faraway is downright painful because the response times are so slow. One has to wait for the characters to be acknowledged by the server. and when that time you want to hit a CTRL + C because you ran the RSYNC command wrong, it doesn’t accept Control C in time. Worse, the SSH terminal then breaks down. Enter Mosh and it solves all the said problems and some more. It allows for:
Tailscale.com’s download page doesn’t list if it’s available for FreeBSD. But it does work on FreeBSD (tested on Release 14). Here’s how:
Install the package: pkg install tailscale Edit /etc/rc.conf to add tailscaled_enable="YES" Run service tailscaled start. If you get an error, reboot. After reboot, run tailscale login. Grab the url, copy paste in a browser and approve the connection. You can now ssh into the machine from another ’tailscaled’ machine from within your LAN or outside your home/office. How to update Tailscale # Once installed, when you run the command tailscale on FreeBSD as root, you get a list of all the commands. Use tailscale update to update.
On local machine, run ssh-keygen This creates two files /.ssh/id_rsa.pub (public key) and /.ssh/id_rsa (private key). Still on local machine, run ssh-copy-id remoteusername@remoteserver This copies your public key to remote server. Now try doing ssh to remote machine, no password should be required. if ssh-copy-id fails # Sometimes, ssh-copy-id gives an error and doesn’t copy the files. In that case, use this one liner but replace the remoteuser and servername: