I don’t have access to my router and my ISP charges for port forwarding (I think they might have a CGNAT setup?).

I’m trying to work around that since I want to start hosting some apps and game servers from my PC. I’m seeing a lot of talk about tailscale as a possible solution to this but honestly I’m a bit confused with all the options and whether this is actually the proper tool for the job.

Assuming it is, do I go the route of setting up a “tailscale funnel” or a “subnet”? Will other people have to install tailscale too if they want to join my servers? People also mention Netmaker or Cloudflared Tunnel, although it also seems like cloudflare doesn’t want their tunnels used for game and media traffic?

The more expensive option I guess would be just paying for protonvp premium since it offers port forwarding in that case, but I’m not sure about performance and whether it’s worth it, at that point I might just rent a server instead.

Hoping you folks at self-hosted have more ideas on how can I, well… self host instead of throwing money at the problem.

  • MangoPenguinEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    Will other people have to install tailscale too if they want to join my servers?

    Yes if you use Tailscale VPN (with or without subnet routers), this makes a private network.

    No if you use Tailscale Funnel, as this exposes your service to the internet.

    Tailscale Funnel does only seem to support TCP though, so games that use UDP will not work with it.

    Here’s a list of tunnels, but it’s not clear which ones support UDP: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

    • Cyno@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Thanks for linking that, seems like a great resource! Seems like there’s a few that support UDP although I’m not sure if they will work with a CGNAT setup, also their setup seems a bit more complicated and technical than expected but I need to look more into it tomorrow. If everyone else needs to have this installed then that might be an issue

      • MangoPenguinEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Yeah my ISP uses CGNAT for residential as well, and I just ended up buying a static IP for the $5 a month to get rid of that issue.

        • Cyno@programming.devOPEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I was really hoping there was something like hamachi/xfire/garena from the old days but modernized and more stable 😅 I just assumed it’d be a solved problem by now.

          I’m not giving up on tailscale yet, I’ll try the funnel feature but yeah… seems a bit troublesome for sure

          • MangoPenguinEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            Tailscale VPN is pretty similar to how Hamachi worked, Zerotier is another similar option.