[jauer]

> Because, for whatever reason I’ve yet to grasp, homelab folks like to implement Tailscale as some sort of “secure virtual network” abstraction layer - think something similar to zScaler ZPA - on top of their local LAN.

This is Tailscale's intended behavior, not a matter of how homelab folks like to implement it: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/659#issuecomme...

[stego-tech]

This is why I (thought I) prefaced my gripe with the context of date and documentation. Looking at modern docs, yeah, it absolutely looks like it’s trying to be a Freemium alternative to something like zScaler but on top of Wireguard (virtual secure network), but the OP’s article still makes me bristle because it demonstrates the lack of knowledge of the implications of that deployment model.

Case in point is that their grievance is about SMB to their NAS being routed over Tailscale despite being on the same network as the SMB endpoints. Ideally this is something that should’ve come up during the architecture phase of deployment: how should traffic be handled when both machines share the same network? When should Tailscale’s routing table prefer the local adapter over the Tailscale adapter? If Tailscale cannot be configured to advertise a specific link speed that accurately reflects network conditions, how can we apply policies to the endpoints to route traffic correctly?

I admittedly used this article as a personal soapbox to yell at (software) folks to get out of my lane (IT), and that was a fault of mine; I should’ve taken more time to articulate the pitfalls of these sorts of rapid deployments homelabs can facilitate, and share my expertise from my field with others instead of grandstanding. That’s on me.

[RockRobotRock]

Maybe I'm not understanding properly, but why can't my device ARP ping and handshake with the subnet router to determine that I'm on the local subnet and to stop routing it through Tailscale?

[jauer]

Tailscale intentionally overrides your device's routing table to force traffic between hosts in the same subnet to go over a Wireguard tunnel instead of bypassing it. They do this because they believe that the presumption that a local subnet is trustworthy is false.

[lmm]

It could, but the Tailscale devs don't consider "silently start leaking traffic to anyone on the local subnet" to be a desirable feature.