Is all internet activity run through it? Is it possible to be connected to tailscale and another vpn at the same time?
As far as I know no, the tailscale layer by default only connects your devices together whilst still allowing them to work like usuall in their different lan networks.
You can however enable exit nodes which would route your traffic to a single device on a network that would then act like a sub-router for that network. This is to say that all the main router would see would be more traffic from the device running as a sub router and not all of your tailscale devices.
By default Tailscale is an overlay network, meaning it only routes traffic between devices running Tailscale. (Called nodes.) You can set one of the devices as exit node which will route all traffic through that device – for example, you have a server at home set as exit node, and you can use Tailscale from your phone and route all traffic through the exit node, so that you’re basically browsing from home.
As for the second question about using Tailscale with another VPN – sort of but requires a workaround.
Mullvad $5 exit node is what you want.
what about mullvad exit nodes? do they act as a vpn?
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Tailscale can route all traffic if you have exit nodes configured.
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if the OS allows simultaneous VPN connections and there are no conflicting routes.
You can route an exit node device(apple tv is what I use) through a traditional consumer VPN with many routers. I do this.
This has been asked so many times, I wrote a blog post about it Tailscale vs NordVPN, Mullvad, etc
I see that makes sense
Tailscale is a normal VPN in the true sense that it creates a virtual private network with your devices. You can use exit nodes to route internet traffic through one of your devices.
For the second question, yes it is possible. I run tailscale continuously on my laptop in order to manage multiple servers. I also run wireguard nonstop in order to connect to another server (for redundancy). This hasn’t caused me any issues or need for advanced configuration. Just make sure you don’t set both networks to use the same subnet.
I can’t answer for everything but the software my wife is trying to connect to on my dad’s PC didn’t work until I edited the windows host file to go to his tailnet IP address for his machine name. Not sure if that IP address ever changes in tailnet but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.
Yes, on the Mac I have Tailscale and I’m connected to my work VPN (L2TP over IPSec) at the same time. you can’t use Tailscale as an exit node at the same time.
It can act like a normal VPN to your site and if you have a VPN set up as an exit node then you can route all your traffic over the VPN. Mullvad exit nodes are available which give you a limited number of devices. It is however to set up a Mullvad (or any other support VPN) Gluetun docker container and have that be an exit node. It will route the traffic of any device which uses this exit node so you do not have the device limit of the purchased vpn exit nodes
What would be the advantage of having 2?
Your paragraph about main router vs sub-router is confusing. It assumes that all devices are behind a single main router, which is often not the case. For example, my devices on the tailnet all over the internet, separated by oceans
Understand but…. I’ve set my PC in NC as an exit node. I connect to it when I travel abroad via MS RD. When I access a gambling web site with that NC PC, they know I’m using MS RD.
That should be a sticky. It never made sense to me calling it a VPN because it’s not how I would use an inbound VPN in a corporate environment. Thinking about the so-called vpns as a proxy to mask where you’re going makes a lot more sense.
Your blog post does not answer my question. My question was can a machine be connected to tailscale and another vpn at the same time.
Just a caveat - Tailscale plus another VPN on the same machine generally doesn’t work well, if at all. But if you put Tailscale on the router, then yes, very easy to use a different VPN client on the machine.