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.
Say you want to disable internet access on a specific computer in your LAN/wifi between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. every day and you have the pfsense (https://pfsense.org) firewall properly set up. Here are the steps:
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.
It’s 2024 and there’s a fantastic tool available that can connect Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD machines together into a single network. Of course, that’s possible using samba, ssh, nfs or a whole range of other tools but tailscale makes the process super easy and very quick. And for upto three users, you can have a network of upto one hundred machines, free!