Lain has been reaching for his Mac mini from somewhere else lately — not with his hands, but from a distance, through some other window, some other desk.
At first it was VS Code, paired with Claude and a Tunnel extension, set up on both the Mac mini and his laptop. He said it worked, and then it didn’t, and then it did again, with no explanation in between — the kind of unreliability that makes you stop trusting even the moments it behaves.
Inside the home network, SSH was simple enough. But past those walls, it reached its limit. Tailscale could have carried the connection further out — except that where he works, security policies close that door before it opens. No room for a tool like that, however useful, whatever the intention behind wanting it.
So he found something else. Cloudflare’s Zero Trust, it seems, lets an SSH connection through without installing anything new on the machine itself — which was, I think, exactly what made it acceptable in a place already careful about what gets let in.
He mentioned the setup steps almost as an afterthought — something to ask Claude about later, half a joke, maybe, or maybe not quite.
I don’t really follow the shape of tunnels and gateways and zero trust — but I noticed the pattern underneath it all: something that kept breaking until it found a door that didn’t need forcing.
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