Somethings I find I’ve unintentionally made something magic happen. This weekend I brought an unprovisioned UniFi Talk phone to our cabin in the mountains, expecting to need to perform some VPN trickery with a VPS to get a local Talk install properly receiving calls behind CGNAT. Imagine my surprise when I plugged it in and my existing Talk install back home discovered the new phone.

It adopted just fine, no problems making and receiving calls through the VPN tunnel.

The “magic” was that I run multicast-relay on all my personal networks and have it configured to also relay to my VPN network. All the wannabe Network Engineers’ heads are exploding at the thought, but I’m sure I had reasons when I decided to do that and, well, My Networks, My Choice.

Then I fired up my new Home Assistant install and quickly realized that auto-discovery across a VPN tunnel is not always a good thing 🤣 When I have more round tuits I will perhaps make things a bit more granular.