Tailscale and Eversolo

Introduction

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’ve been on a Tailscale kick lately. I’ve been using it to connect all my devices and generally manage my network safely and securely.

Not too long ago I acquired a server. I have a handful of things that I do with it.

• File serving
• Music hosting
• Game servers
• Photo backup and hosting
• Recipe storage

All (except for the file serving) of these services I run in containers using Podman. I’m using systemd and quadlets to keep all of them running. Using quadlets makes it easy to slide a Tailscale container into the mix for each of the services, and makes it easy to share with Tailscale.

Music

Let’s talk a bit about music. I’ve taken my collection of digital music and stored it on my server. It’s mostly flac files, and I use beets to keep the metadata maintained. Not too long ago I discovered Navidrome, and I am using it serve my music to my devices.

Navidrome

Navidrome is a really nice piece of software. I like that it makes my music searchable, and supports live encoding to mp3 or aac for devices that don’t support flac.

When I’m mobile, I use symfonium to browse my music and play it on my phone. Thanks to Navidrome and Tailscale it’s easy to do this securely.

To accomplish this I create a pod for navidrome and run navidrome, and caddy (with the tailscale plugin) in the pod.

navidrome.pod

[Pod]
PodName=navidrome
PublishPort=4533:4533

navidrome.container

[Unit]
Description=Navidrome Music Service
After=network-online.target

[Container]
Image=docker.io/deluan/navidrome:0.56.1
Pod=navidrome.pod
Mount=type=bind,source=/zfs/tank/music,destination=/music,ro=true
SecurityLabelDisable=true
Volume=navidrome.volume:/data
EnvironmentFile=%h/navidrome.env
LogDriver=json-file
LogOpt=path=%h/navidrome.log
LogOpt=max-size=512mb

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

caddy.container

[Unit]
Description=Caddy Navidrome Proxy
After=navidrome.container
Requires=navidrome.container

[Container]
Image=ghcr.io/tailscale/caddy-tailscale:main
Pod=navidrome.pod
Volume=caddy_config.volume:/config
Volume=caddy_data.volume:/data
EnvironmentFile=%h/caddy.env
SecurityLabelDisable=true
Mount=type=bind,source=%h/conf,destination=/etc/caddy
LogDriver=json-file
LogOpt=path=%h/ts-caddy.log
LogOpt=max-size=512mb

[Service]
Restart=always

With all this in place I can go to https://navidrome.<TAILNET-NAME>.ts.net and listen to my music securely from anywhere.

Eversolo DMP-A6

Life is easy until you upgrade your stereo.

I had been a user of Sonos for a long time, but my experience with them has been less than stellar. I decided to shop around for a new device that would support higher bit-rates, and a better user experience.

When I received my Eversolo DMP-A6, I plugged it into my network and my stereo. I connected it to my SMB share and was able to see my music files. The remote app worked well, and I was able to play music from my server.

What I really wanted was to use Symfonium as my remote app, and play music on my DMP-A6. Theoretically this was possible. In fact, Symfonium gave me the option to select my DMP-A6 as a playback device. This wasn’t going to work though. My app is connecting to my Navidrome server over Tailscale, but the DMP-A6 was connecting to the server over my local network. Any hand-off would fail because the DMP-A6 didn’t know how to resolve Tailscale DNS names.

It’s hardly a secret the Eversolo is using a heavily modified version of Android as their operating system. It’s also hardly a secret that you can sideload applications onto these devices too.

With this knowledge I installed the Android Tailscale client onto my DMP-A6, joined it to my tailnet, and tagged it. Added a grant that allowed the music-player to communicate with the music-server, and it worked.