Everything is set up and it works. This last article is about the unglamorous half: the order you do things in every day, the outside-in checklist that finds a fault in four moves instead of forty, what to do before and after an update, and the short note that means the next person to touch this — possibly you, a year from now — is not starting from nothing.

Everything so far has been about reaching Home Assistant itself, and for that you need nothing in this article. A subnet router is for the rest of the house — the printer, the old NAS, the settings page on your switch — hardware that will never have Tailscale installed on it. This article covers whether that is worth doing at all, how to advertise exactly one subnet, and why the route then sits th

By now Home Assistant is in your tailnet and you can open it from somewhere else. Those two things are on or off. This article is about the settings in between: narrowing who is allowed through, and replacing the address-and-port you have been typing with a proper HTTPS name that never leaves the tailnet. Neither is hard. Both are easy to get wrong in the direction of too much access.

Home Assistant has joined your tailnet. That is not yet a web address you can type on your phone from a train. This article turns it into one — a private HTTPS URL that only devices logged in to the same tailnet can open — and then covers the other half of daily use: treating every phone and laptop in that tailnet as an asset you name, audit and switch off when it leaves.

Part 1 left you with the Tailscale app installed and running. Running is not the same as joined — at this point it belongs to nobody's network. This article covers the one sign-in that makes your Home Assistant a member of your private network, the two separate places you check that it worked, and how to read the app's status and log. That last part looks like housekeeping. It is actually the shor

You want to see your dashboard while you are out. The usual advice is to forward a port, which puts your Home Assistant login on the public internet as the only thing between a stranger and your house. There is a quieter way: put your phone and your Home Assistant machine on the same private network, so the door is never in public at all. This article covers what that private network is, the four