Reach your Mac mini from anywhere.

At the office, your laptop and phone reach the Mac mini over your own network. Away from the office (at home, in a café, on 4G or 5G), they need Tailscale: a free app that links your own devices together privately. Nobody else can reach your Mac through it, and nothing is opened up on your office router.

What you need

• A free Tailscale account. Sign in with a Google, Microsoft or Apple account.
• The Tailscale app on the Mac mini, on your laptop and on your phone, all signed in to the same Tailscale account.

Set it up

1. On the Mac mini, download Tailscale from the Mac App Store or tailscale.com, open it and sign in.
2. Do the same on your laptop.
3. On your phone, install Tailscale from the App Store or Google Play and sign in to the same account.
4. In the Tailscale admin page (login.tailscale.com), find the Mac mini under Machines, open its menu and choose Disable key expiry. This stops the Mac mini being signed out every few months while nobody is looking at it.
5. In ReddropAI on the Mac mini, open Settings › Devices. The address shown there is the one your laptop and phone use.

   [ Screenshot coming ]

   Settings, Devices, showing the address phones and Macs use to reach this Mac

Using it day to day

• At the office you don't need to do anything.
• Away from the office, switch Tailscale on on your laptop or phone before opening ReddropAI. On a phone, it can stay on all the time.
• If the app says it can't reach your Mac, check Tailscale is on, then see Troubleshooting.

If someone else owns the Mac mini

If we look after a Mac mini for you, or you look after one for a client, the owner keeps their own Tailscale account and shares just that one machine. In the Tailscale admin page, open the Mac mini's menu and choose Share…, then send the invite link. The person invited can reach that one Mac and nothing else on the network, and the owner can remove the share at any time.