Hi All,

I have been banging my head against the wall for a while now trying to get to the root of this issue. Previously I had this working perfectly fine, but I wiped my Unraid flash because of some unrelated issues and moved my Unraid config to a new flash drive. Now ever since essentially starting from scratch I cannot get Tailscale to work the same as it was previously.

Essentially what I am trying to do is use Tailscale + NextDNS + NGINX to access my Docker containers (namely Sonarr and Radarr) when I am away from my home network. I have the following setup below. I would love for someone to review and see if I am missing anything anywhere.

• NextDNS rewrite setup so that if I type *.homelab, traffic is directed to my local Unraid IP

  • This has remained unchanged since before I changed my Unraid flash

    

• NGINX proxies setup for all of my containers so that sonarr.docker.homelab for example navigates to my Unraid ip + the port for my sonarr container

  • This has also remained unchanged since before I changed my Unraid flash

• Tailscale nameserver is setup to use my NextDNS configuration correctly

  • This has also remained unchanged since before I changed my Unraid flash

    

• I can access all of my containers using the .homelab rewrite when on my local network perfectly fine, but when trying to do so when away from home and connected to Tailscale it doesn't work

• Only differences are the following

  • Most or all of my containers do not have a custom docker network setup or assigned, they are all on bridge or host

  • I don't know for sure if I have the Tailscale plugin settings setup correctly to facilitate what I am trying to do, I've pasted a screenshot below

    

    

The DNS settings on the Unraid server (Allow Tailscale DNS settings / Accept DNS) don't actually matter for what you're trying to do.

Disabling "Unraid services listen on Tailscale IP" is very unusual. Is there a reason for that?
I'd also recommend turning "Enable IP Forwarding" on... without that, forwarding for IPv6 might not be enabled (which could be relevant since you're allowing the server to be an exit node).

When you reconnected Tailscale on the server, you would have gotten a new Tailscale IP. Did you update that in the rewrite?

The DNS configuration in Tailscale looks OK, but there are some cases where it doesn't get applied on the clients (e.g., if an iOS/MacOS DNS profile is installed, using Private DNS on Android).

On 11/17/2025 at 9:43 PM, EDACerton said:

The DNS settings on the Unraid server (Allow Tailscale DNS settings / Accept DNS) don't actually matter for what you're trying to do.

Disabling "Unraid services listen on Tailscale IP" is very unusual. Is there a reason for that?
I'd also recommend turning "Enable IP Forwarding" on... without that, forwarding for IPv6 might not be enabled (which could be relevant since you're allowing the server to be an exit node).

When you reconnected Tailscale on the server, you would have gotten a new Tailscale IP. Did you update that in the rewrite?

The DNS configuration in Tailscale looks OK, but there are some cases where it doesn't get applied on the clients (e.g., if an iOS/MacOS DNS profile is installed, using Private DNS on Android).

Sorry, circling back to this, I gave up for a bit, but trying to fix this issue now.

I turned Enable IP Forwarding on and Reenabled Unraid services listen on Tailscale IP and am still seeing the same issue.

The IP address in my NextDNS DNS rewrite does not refer to the Tailscale IP, it refers to my local Unraid IP, this enables me to use the DNS rewrites when connected to Tailscale and when not connected to Tailscale.

Since I can connect using the DNS rewrites on my local network without Tailscale, I know the DNS portion is working, it has to be some kind of issue or something I'm missing within the Tailscale config of my Unraid machine.

Edited December 21, 2025Dec 21 by semicole