Tailscale and travel routers connectivity issue

Technical Support for Routers
1

Hi all, slightly different issue / question than usual I think based on my search.

I have a GL-inet travel router, and an android device with tailscale installed. I have a functioning exit node on my home network.

  • When am travelling, and I either use cellular data, or hotel wifi, I can turn on my android tailscale and connect to my local servers and see that my IP is properly routing through my home network.
  • When I connect to my travel router, and turn on tailscale on my android device, my IP is routing through my home network but I am unable to connect to any devices on my home network.
  • I am not using tailscale or other vpn services on the travel router itself

Is there a setting in the travel router I need to mess with to allow my devices to connect to tailscale when they are using the router wifi?

thanks in advance all!

2

Hello,

Tailscale runs on Android and use the exit node of home, if the exit node is connected normally, Android has routed directly through the home and exit, which should have nothing to do with the connected GL router or cellular/hotel WiFi.

  1. Is there a PC that can do a comparison test? If have a PC, it is more convenient to check the route of tailscale when enable through the exit node.

  2. Is there any other router, or another phone (enable the hotspot, emulate it to a router), Android is connected to the router or phone, and can Android be connected to the exit node?

4

Hi,

Thank you for the reply Bruce! For the exit node, I believe it is working, as my IP changes to my home IP address on the client device when my android turns on tailscale, regardless of hotel wifi, cellular data, or GL router.

My issue is android being able to access devices from my home LAN, which works on tailscale and cellular, tailscale and directly hotel WIFI, but not tailscale through GL router.

Unfortunately I do not have a spare device with me to test your other use cases, but this has happened at multiple hotels in the past too.

One thing that might be useful info: hotel IP address is 17x.x.x, my GL router is default, at 192.168.8.x, but my home network is 10.0.x.x

Could that be causing any issues?

thank you!!

5

Hello,

Is the hotel's primary router or firewall network devices and the IP is 10.0.0.0?

Please try to enable tailsclae with exit node directly on the router to see if the node is available or fine on this network environment.

6

Hi and thanks again for your continued support Bruce.

I am no longer at the hotel, but I can reaffirm the following:

  1. When connected to the hotel directly, my DHCP assigned IP address was 17x.x.x, enabling tailscale on my device allowed me to access my home tailnet with IPs 10.0.x.x

  2. When using my phone's data, my IP was 70.x.x.x, and I could access 10.0.x.x through tailscale.

  3. When connected to the hotel through my GL inet router with default settings (router has admin console at 192.168.8.1) and enabling tailscale, I am unable to access 10.x.x.x, I believe my IP was still 17x.x.x.x but I am unable to verify now.

7

Hi,

My jobs and certainly support customer issues as much as outer.

Try enable the router's tailscale, Android disable, instead of Android devices as tailscale client. This also enables the use of tailscale as the exit node. How about this?