Accessing my printer's web app remotely via Tailscale

We have an HP all-in-one scanner and printer that is on our local network. Recently, I was away from home and needed to reconfigure the scanning settings for unimportant reasons.

Usually, when I’m not in the office, I use Tailscale to connect back to machines as required, but the printer isn’t running Tailscale, so its built-in web app isn’t directly available. To solve this problem, I set up Tailscale subnet route on the Linux box I have in the office.

As this is Linux box, it was easy enough to SSH into it and I ran:

sudo tailscale set --advertise-routes=192.168.220./24

I can’t remember why our local network uses the 192.168.220.0 range; I suspect it’s related to a client’s VPN config being overbearing, before I started jailing such clients in a VM.

The Linux box now knows about the subnet route. To enable it, head over the machines tab of the Tailscale admin, find the machine in question and click the “…” button to find the “Edit route settings” item to authorise it.

Once this was done, Chrome on my remote Mac could access the printer’s web app on https://192.168.220.24 and I did the admin required remotely.

I’m unclear if there’ll be any issues leaving this route enabled all the time, as issue 1227 implies that everything local might get routed via my Linux box, so I disabled it after use and will enable it as an when I need it.