Tips for using the gateway server
Connecting remotely to your server over ssh
Note: this only works if the device from which you want to ssh into your server is not already connected to another tailnet. If that is the case, you may have to use a work around (coming soon!) like using fast user switching.
- The easiest way to do this is to add the machine from which you want to access the server remotely (i.e. your laptop or home computer) to the private tailscale network which the gateway and all servers are connected to. To do this, you'll need to install tailscale on your machine and run the same tailscale command which you used to connect your server to the gateway:
curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh && sudo tailscale up --auth-key=<redacted>
- You may need to run the second part of the command
sudo tailscale up --auth-key=<redacted> again.
Using the gateway server with a different domain
- If you are serving a site or server behind the gateway, but for a domain that is not a sub-domain of
commoninternet.net, you will need to manually configure some DNS records to get everything hooked up correctly. Specifically, you'll need to tell DNS servers that your domain should actually resolve to the IP of the gateway.
- Specifically, you'll want to add a custom DNS
A record that points your domain (the host) to the value of the IP pointed at by gateway.commoninternet.net, or wherever the gateway server is hosted. The IP address can be found by looking up the domain on a DNS lookup website like DNS checker. This looks something like this for pointing a subdomain of an owned domain to the gateway (screenshot taken from Squarespace):
- It's possible the gateway's IP address will change from time to time, especially as we onboard new member-stewards who may take on hosting responsibilities and move the server around. To avoid this, it's posible to use a
CNAME record to alias your domain to gateway.commoninternet.net without needing to update it unless the gateway's domain changes, which is likely rare. However, not all domain hosting providers support CNAME records.
Deleting a server from the gateway
