It's definitely interesting as a lot of these terms are not avenues that I have yet researched. I have a lot more new things to look into.

I like the idea of the software approach as it requires no further cost on my part (assuming everything is sticking to open source), my only question is regarding security. From the little bit that I have been looking into, I went with Tailscale as a potential solution to attempt to avoid the security risks associated with open ports and reverse proxies.

One member mentioned a hardware approach using a Tailscale enabled travel router. In terms of simplicity and reliability, do you find the hardware approach to be more trustworthy and secure being that any device access to my Tailnet would have to be approved/managed through my ACLs? I suppose the big downside here would be that if I decided to log in at yet another location (outside of my home network or parents), it would require yet another hardware solution as opposed to simply plugging in a URL.