Getting from Delhi back to a Minnesota meant unforgiving networks. Tailscale Peer Relays offered a massive improvement.

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Tailscale's Peer Relays feature provides a solution for poor international network connectivity by allowing users to designate their own nodes as dedicated traffic relays. When connecting from Delhi to Minnesota infrastructure, the author experienced severely throttled throughput (2.2 Mbits/sec) through Tailscale's shared DERP relay infrastructure due to CGNAT and symmetric NAT preventing direct peer-to-peer connections. By configuring a peer relay on homelab infrastructure, throughput improved 12.5x to 27.5 Mbits/sec. The setup involves enabling relay server mode on a node, port forwarding UDP traffic, and configuring ACL grants. Peer relays provide dedicated capacity without competing for bandwidth on shared infrastructure while maintaining end-to-end WireGuard encryption.

Using Tailscale's Peer Relays to fix a homelab connection from across the globe