addon-tailscale VS ZeroTier

I did file an issue asking them to make that flag, along with the --advertise-exit-node flag which is also hard-coded, optional.

I appreciate that Tailscale runs the DNS server so it's one less thing for me to manage. Similarly, the built-in LE is just icing on the cake as it's one less thing to think about. Once https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-tailscale/pull/89 is merged, running Home Assistant on a VPN with a LE certificate, would be such a quick setup for anyone.

Indeed, you can do all that yourself as you point out. Just last night I manually created a public domain to point to a ZeroTier address and ran the Lets Encrypt addon in Home Assistant to generate a certificate via the DNS challenge. Didn't take long, but there were many steps involved (creating a Google Cloud service account and configuring everything).

There is a community-supported HomeAssistant addon which does: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-tailscale

ZeroTier - Layer 2 overlay network. They take decentralization seriously, and like to say "decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works." Written in C++.

EDIT - I'm tired and cross-eyed after a bunch of internet searching and rabbit holes... A supposed ZeroTier dev said on April 25, 2023 that this would be addressed in a future release of the app in this thread: https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/issues/1952. On August 10th, another engineer said that they are waiting for a car to be delivered.

Solution 2: Wait for support from Zerotier-One with DBUS

A Smart Ethernet Switch for Earth

https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne (11.5k stars)

If you just want to connect between your devices, you don't need any hardware. Just install zerotier on them.