I Traced My Traffic Through a Home Tailscale Exit Node
I set up Tailscale years ago but only used it for “reach my own devices” use cases. This week I finally set up a proper home exit node: a tiny dedicated LXC on my Proxmox box (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, basically just Tailscale).
To verify it worked, I pinged my home servers and they worked. But I wanted to understand this deeper, so I turned to traceroute .
The 7th hop is where the cogs in my brain began turning. That’s my home ISP. So this is like a VPN, right? Or is it different?
Without an exit node, Tailscale sends traffic to my Tailscale devices , but normal web traffic goes out through my local network or ISP ( exit nodes docs ).
With an exit node enabled, my device changes its default internet path to a chosen device, which then sends traffic to the internet for me.
For internet traffic, an exit node behaves like a traditional VPN gateway, with a caveat: Tailscale isn’t always a VPN tunnel for all traffic, but the exit-node mode is.