Glossary

What is a tailnet?

A tailnet is your private network on Tailscale. Every device signed in to your Tailscale account joins it and gets a stable address (like 100.96.237.43) and a name (like mini.tailXXXX.ts.net). Devices on it can reach each other from anywhere, at home, at work or on a phone, and nothing on the public internet can. The tailnet's access rules decide which devices and people can connect to what.

Why it's better than port forwarding

To reach a home machine without Tailscale, you open a port on your router to the whole internet. Every bot scanning for SSH then finds you. A tailnet keeps that port closed: only devices the tailnet's access rules allow can connect. On a tailnet with only you in it and no shared machines, that means your own devices. Other members of a shared or company tailnet, and anyone you share a machine with, can reach it as far as the rules allow.

What it's good for

  • SSH into a Mac mini or home server from anywhere.
  • Open a dev server running at home from your laptop.
  • Use your desktop from your phone.

How Pane uses it

Remote Pane connects your laptop or phone to your other machines over your tailnet by default. Pane Workspaces use the same tailnet so an agent on one machine can read files and run commands on another, with no SSH keys to manage. Use your computer from any device

Related

Sources

Corrections
If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and update the date at the top. Open an issue on GitHub
Sources
or
Download*
Windows SmartScreen warningDirect downloads can show a SmartScreen warning while Pane is unsigned. Pane is fully open source, so you can audit the code and build from source yourself.1. Click More info2. Click Run anyway3. Continue the installerThe PowerShell install downloads the official release directly and avoids most browser download friction.npm global install
Paste that in PowerShell.Linux

By Parsa Khazaeepoul, co-founder of Pane. .