firewalla VS tailscale

firewalla is open source https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla

Just to follow up because I think I misread OP—they’re looking at Firewalla who publishes their source on github, and it looks a lot like your classic FOSS firewall running suricata and probably doing DNS-based filtering. I bet if you dig into their source you’ll find dnscryptproxy, unbound, or dnsmasq with filter sets.

Using the Firewalla VPN Client for a 3rd party connection is one way. What this means is that devices on your network can initiate connections through the VPN to external addresses, and those external addresses can respond and make use of the established connection (ex: your machine uses a browser to request the webpage https://help.firewalla.com through the vpn connection, and the server hosting the webpage receives the request and is able to respond, by sending the requested webpage)

search https://help.firewalla.com you will find more articles on this topic. And if not, the communitly likely have more https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001948014-Expanding-Firewalla-Docker-Third-Party-Apps-Scripts-

there are a few threads https://help.firewalla.com like this https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4411622449811-Omada-Controller-Docker

From my understanding zeek does the inspection (probably not https / tls ) and generates alerts (internally) which Firewallas software (https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla) picks up and analyses then throws out alerts / blocks as they see fit.

Technically yes, but also maybe no. Firewalla's software is open source. You can download and modify it on GitHub. If you really wanted to, you could fork it and strip out all of the firewalla-specific code (ie licensing, app integration, etc.) and replace it with your own code.

Tailscale - Built on WireGuard. Easy to use. Control server is closed source. Client code available with a BSD3 license + separate patents file.

Tailscale

I'm using the GitHub version of tailscaled on one of my Macs as a background daemon launched at boot. To upgrade to the latest version, try the following:

Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard® protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other.

Might be possible to do using a VPN as long as you can get broadcast/multicast packets forwarded.

Tailscale unfortunately doesn't support it...yet?

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013

Tailscale - Make depaware output patch compatible

Tailscale is another way of doing it. I'm using it to access my Pi's Samba shares from my phone but it works from Windows as well.