Topic: Securely Expose Your Weather Station Dashboards with Tailscale and Caddy

[Techno500]

Securely Expose Your Weather Station Dashboards with Tailscale and Caddy

One Domain. Two Dashboards. Zero Exposed Internals.

I have  a new project on Hackster.io:  https://www.hackster.io/AB9NQ/secure-weather-dashboards-via-tailscale-and-caddy-94c424

Project is a step by step tutorial.

Regards,
Wlliam, AB9NQ

[broadstairs]

Lovely idea but frankly this is something I would never consider, just too big a risk. Much better to have a separate hosted weather site.

Stuart

[Techno500]

Tailscale & Tailscale Funnel — Worth Knowing About

If you've ever wanted to share something running on your home machine with the outside world — or securely connect your devices without messing with port forwarding — Tailscale is worth 10 minutes of your time.

What is Tailscale?

Tailscale is a VPN, but not the kind you're probably thinking of. Traditional VPNs funnel all your traffic through a central server. Tailscale instead creates a mesh network — every device (your home PC, laptop, phone, even a Raspberry Pi) talks directly to every other device, encrypted end-to-end using WireGuard under the hood. Once installed, your devices get their own private IPs (in the 100.x.x.x range) that only you can see. No port forwarding, no firewall rules, no fuss.

It's free for personal use, works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android — even routers.

Note:  Tailscale even works with CGNAT, like T-Mobile Internet; where you are unable to use port forwarding!

What is Tailscale Funnel?


This is the part a lot of people haven't heard of. Funnel lets you expose a service running on your machine to the public internet — without opening any ports on your router.

You might have heard of ngrok or Expose — tools that create a temporary public tunnel to your local machine. Funnel is similar in concept, but with some meaningful differences:

 It's built into Tailscale — no separate account or tool needed
 You get a real, stable HTTPS URL (like https://yourname.ts.net) — not a random string that changes every session
 TLS is handled automatically — valid certificates, no self-signed cert headaches
 No relay dependency for your private network — Funnel is only for public exposure; your Tailscale devices still talk peer-to-peer

The catch: Funnel is for serving content publicly (a web app, a local weather station dashboard, a Home Assistant instance). It's not a general-purpose proxy for every use case, and it does route public traffic through Tailscale's servers (unlike your private tailnet traffic).

Common wxforum use case: Running a local weather display or data logger you want to share with family, or access remotely without a static IP or DDNS gymnastics.

Worth a look: tailscale.com

[broadstairs]

Tails calendar is totally overkill for the average end user. I can't see any weather enthusiast understanding how to set this up without years of in depth IT experience.

Stuart

[Techno500]

Did you read the project write up on Hackster.io?  https://www.hackster.io/AB9NQ/secure-weather-dashboards-via-tailscale-and-caddy-94c424

Project is written for all users; even those without networking experience.

William Lucid, AB9NQ 
Retired Computer Specialist; with Help Desk experience (dealt we all levels of computer experience!)

[broadstairs]

Sorry but I simply think this is not useful for the average CumulusMX user especially as it comes with a usable public website which can in no way expose any admin functions anyway.

Stuart

[mcrossley]

I have just enabled the VPN server on my router (I could have used my NAS as well) - no central server, point-to-point, easy to set-up and use. Then configured the VPN client on my Windows laptop and added a freebie VPN client to my phone.

[Techno500]

Why pay for a Domain website or the hustle of setting up a website on a free hosting service?  Tailscale with funnel is Free for personal use, fast, and just works!

I am presenting this in the community interests; for anyone who wants to try the project.  I respect opinions of others; this is viable solution for a secure website to present your weather data over the Internet for anyone on the Internet to view.

William, AB9NQ

[mcrossley]

No public web site required for me (though I do have one), I connect direct to the public IP address of the router

But yes, there are many ways to skin a cat.

[Techno500]

Great feature of Tailscale is it can be used even if you can not port forward; that is you are behind a carrier-grade NAT like T-Mobile gateway, then you can not forward ports.

William