The Hitchhiker Tailnet is a private network built with Tailscale. It joins the home machines that serve the `*.localhost` federated wikis to the laptops, Pis and AI workstations of the people who use them. On the tailnet you work on the road exactly as you do at home.
Every device runs the Tailscale client and gets a stable address on a private WireGuard mesh. Nothing is exposed to the public internet. No port forwarding, no VPN server to run.
## The Machines
The tailnet starts with four machines. Names below are the tailnet machine names; the real coordinates travel with the invite, never on this public site.
- `david-mac` — the home Mac. Runs Caddy and the private wiki farm that serves `david.localhost` and friends. See Tailscale on the Mac. - `david-pi` — the Pi 5 that mirrors the public farm. See Tailscale on the Pi. - `david-air` — the MacBook Air that goes on the road. See Roaming Laptop. - `mitch-pc` — Mitch's AI workstation, the first guest. See Onboarding Mitch.
## How It Fits Together
The heart of the design is Wiki Over Tailscale — a small reverse proxy on each roaming machine that carries `*.localhost` requests over the tailnet to the home Caddy, which picks the wiki site by Host header. The same URLs work everywhere, in every browser.
Once the mesh is up, the same trick opens the private wikis to trusted people: invite them to the tailnet and they can read and fork, while editing stays with each wiki's owner. See Tailnet Guests.
## Status
As of July 2026: the Tailscale app is installed on the home Mac (awaiting login), the Pi 5 has the daemon installed and enabled (awaiting `tailscale up`), and the laptop and Mitch's PC are documented but not yet joined.
# Links
- Tailscale 
— the mesh VPN this network is built on
- What is Tailscale — plain introduction
- Tailscale admin console — machines, users, ACLs
# See