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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/M4xusV4ltr0n on 2026-08-04 13:07:27+00:00.
I’ve got stuff I want to access all the time (like files on SeaDrive and photos on Immich). I don’t really like the idea of just being connected to Tailscale all the time, because I really love using adguard’s http filtering on my devices (which needs a VPN of its own) and it seems like it adds some overhead for the 95% of the work that I want to do that doesn’t actually need to be on my home network.
mTLS seemed like the solution and I set it up using Caddy on my server (domain forwards to home router, router sends to Caddy, Caddy checks the certificate). This setup works great (for Immich and web access to services). Honestly love mTLS, it seems like the ideal solution for everything! I give all my devices a certificate, and if they have it, they can access my stuff. And if they don’t, they can’t! It’s exactly what I want!
But now I’m realizing that most apps don’t, in fact, support mTLS (SeaDrive client on windows, mobile apps for like, anything) so I’m kind of back to square one. I looked into STunnel to add SSL encryption via a proxy and while that might work on windows, it still doesn’t fix android app problems, and I feel like I’m getting a little lost in mTLS sauce at this point.
I want to safely expose services to the wider internet. I don’t want to use a VPN on my devices to do it.
Is there some option I’m missing? Should I just suck it up and connect to Tailscale all the time, or is there a more elegant solution that lets me use a vpn for some apps but keep using adguard?
Edit: I know I can use just the DNS portion of Adguard, but the adguard HTTP filtering doesn’t just block ad domains, it can strip ads out of the content itself and just rearrange the whitespace so that it’s as if it never existed. That’s the functionality I’d like to keep, but android won’t let me use two VPNs at once, I have to pick.
Cloudflare tunnels seems like the closest solution, but I worry the 100mb chunk limit will end up causing annoying problems when trying to transfer larger files
Could you put a browser on your server and use it instead of the one on your smartphone?
I’ve never had this problem, even when using a separate VPN on Brave while forcing Tailscale to stay connected deeper in the settings, but if I did I’d double down and use my server as the actual connection to the open internet instead of directly on my smartphone.
