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You can do many things using computers. Some of them are more productive than others. My blog post shows how to authenticate to Grafana. Some people were able to see the idea of Tailscale being used to authenticate to any service as a fascinating fact. Others took this as an opportunity to come up with even more imaginative applications for Tailscale to authenticate. This is the story of one of the latter instances. This is how you get your Minecraft server join your tailnet and authenticate to it using Tailscale. Tailscale is committed to this idea. Connecting your Minecraft server into your tailnet with Tailscale for authentication offers these advantages: You can restrict access to your Minecraft server to just your tailnet to ensure that only those you know can access it. ACLs can be used to lock down access even further (if you want to allow everyone except the known griefer to connect). - You can attribute Minecraft users to Tailscale users, which allows you to keep a more accurate track of who is on the server. - You do not have to alter your Minecraft server using Forge, Bukkit, Paper or Spigot mods. This lets you use an entirely vanilla server with minimal configuration. You can use Node Sharing to add your friends, fellow citizens in blood, and even squadmates to your Minecraft server without having to reveal your server to the internet's scary whimsies. You can also share it with your less likely scary friends that are on your tailnet already. The Minecraft server will be visible on your tailnet, just like any other machine. There are also a lot of drawbacks to this product: - This will not work with the Bedrock version of Minecraft (the one that is compatible with phones, consoles, and tablets). If you're not sure which version of Minecraft you have, check here to learn how to tell the difference between the two. It is necessary to disable the Minecraft server's authentication stack. - If your server listens to the internet's public it will allow anyone to join it without verifying who they are. This isn't what we are looking for here. You might be able to circumvent this using server-side mods but they are out of the scope of this article since we're focused on using unmodified Minecraft clients and servers. To avoid this, you can use an alternative email address. This is accomplished by creating an authentication proxy, similar to Grafana. The proxy will listen for traffic on your tailnet and forward it to the Minecraft server, with one important difference. At the start of the Minecraft session the client will transmit to the server a packet containing the username of the person trying to log in.MINECRAFT Normally, the server is supposed to examine the contents of the packet and verify it against Mojang's authentication servers to verify that you are actually registered as that username in your Minecraft launcher. Based on the result the server will either accept or deny connections. Instead of relying upon Mojang for authentication , we could make use of Tailscale to use Tailscale as authentication. If we also had Mojang for authentication, the proxy will search Tailscale identity information for the Minecraft session and replace the Minecraft username the client gave you with the user's information from Tailscale However, Mojang's authentication servers will have no idea what to do about this. We just bypass them with offline mode in Minecraft that doesn't require any authentication. After the authentication dance The proxy will then forward Minecraft traffic like any other proxy. You can then mine and create the content you want with the people who you trust. You'll be able communicate with your colleagues and come up with amazing ideas together. Setup This patched infrared will allow you to set this up on your tailnet. Infrared is typically used by Minecraft server networks to host massive Minecraft servers that can scale up to thousands of total players at once however, it's also universal enough that it can be used to connect to a basic vanilla Minecraft server. Set up everything like you would using infrared. However, make sure to change the environment variable TS_AUTHKEY to an authentic authkey. If you have the key tagged to your account, your Minecraft server's key to node will not expire, which means it remains connected to your tailnet and allows you to create and mine forever! Something to be aware of is that infrared will require you to connect with the full domain name of the Minecraft server. This is very important. We will make use of the MagicDNS domain that every tailnet has for free. Assuming your Minecraft server is on port 25565, copy the following into configs/tailscale.json: This domain can be located by visiting the DNS settings page. Look for the domain name ending in.beta.tailscale.net. It must be the name of your account followed by.beta.tailscale.net. Add minecraft-proxy. To get your domain's full name, add minecraft-proxy at the end of this line. Make sure you set server-ip to 127.0.0.1 and server-port to 25565 within your server.properties file so that it isn't listening on the public internet: We can be reached on Twitter @Tailscale if there are any other ideas or inventive ways to utilize computers. TJ Horner was the main contributor to the creation of this beautiful creation. I hope you find this article informative.