I’ve Installed A Mesh Network VPN On A Book 🔗
This may come as some surprise, but I love self hosting services. I have a lot of virtual machines running on a host machine plugged into my router, and all of those virtual machines have tailscale running on them. For those of you who don’t know, tailscale is a mesh network VPN that allows you to access your devices from anywhere as if they are on one flat network.
What does that mean? One practical example of this would be my Jellyfin media server. I have all my movies, shows, and music on Jellyfin. I can access those anywhere in the world with an internet connection - even though the machine is on my LAN. In fact, I’m the only one who can access it, since you need to verified on my Tailscale network to see it. This is obviously incredibly useful, and I’ve replaced my need for most streaming services with this setup.
This begs the question, though, why am I adding tailscale to my ereader? Some of the services I host are more simple, and would go great on an ereader. One example is miniflux, my RSS reader of choice. Having access to an RSS feed on an ereader seems like a no brainer to digest news as it comes in. However, what if I’m away from home and want to read my feed on my ereader? That’s where tailscale comes in!
The rest of this article will describe the conditions needed to be met to make this a reality, most of which are extremely easy. For reference my ereader is a Kobo Libra 2.
Installation Steps 🔗
Prerequisite Steps 🔗
The process of adding your own software to a Kobo Libra 2 consists of the following:
- Rooting your device
- enabling SSH access
- Copying over the installation repo for tailscale on the device
These steps are very straightforward, and the hard work has been done by the Mobile Read forums and the user videah on github.
Rooting a Kobo Libra 2 is incredibly easy. In fact all you have to do is follow this blogpost. I won’t reiterate the steps since the blog post contains the steps and files needed.
Once that is done, you can move onto the next step of adding ssh capabilities. Yet again, just visit this forum post made by NiLuJe to learn how to add multiple useful binaries, ssh included.
Installing Tailscale 🔗
Finally, we can move on to the point of this article: Installing Tailscale on a Kobo. First, we want to clone this github repo which contains all of the required files needed. Then, mount your kobo to your computer to copy the files over (or just use rsync!) Once the files are on the Kobo, SSH into it and navigate to the repo folder. Then go to the libra2 directory, run ./install-tailscale.sh, and finally activate it with tailscale up. Authenticate the Kobo then you’re in!
In Closing 🔗
This article is extremely short, but that’s because I don’t need to reiterate all the guides I already linked to. I mainly just wanted to share this because I thought that the premise was extremely useful, and also it’s cool to be able to install a wireguard vpn (tailscale is wireguard after all!) on an ereader.
P.S.: This may be my last post for a few days since I’m about to be starting a new job, and will likely not have so many free hours in a day to draft up massive posts. They’ll be coming at a slower rate. I hope you don’t mind dear reader(s?)