An iPad with Tailscale

Apple is switching their entire lineup to ARM processors so soon all our dev machines will be super little RISC processors. I've been doing this already, thanks to an iPad Pro with some internet connection it has become my go-to mobile machine. Now with tailscale it's almost usable!

My setup:

• blink.sh
• tailscale
• google cloud

Create a private cloud instance with your favourite distro. Install tailscale by either the browser or app based ssh utility. Init tailscale and login.

tailscale up

Close the ssh connection and head over to blink.sh. Add your new host: gtail.

Now you should be able to login with mosh:

mosh gtail

And that's it! Theres no need to configure the firewall for access to your instance. Tailscale punches out allowing you to use secure defaults. Anything web hosted can be accessed in safari with the <host>:<port. When you finally decide to call it a day simple disconnect and shutdown your shell instance. Mosh over a wireguard VPN is a speedy and easy developement environment.

Tips

Copying files to and from your iPad can be done with scp.

scp ipad-view.png gtail:/path/to/ipad-view.png

NB: Authentication issue can be resolved with logging in with ssh2 to correctly set credentials for curl.