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House unreachable

Work down the ladder — each step tells you which rung failed.

1. Is it the house, or is it you?

Open the Tailscale admin console (login.tailscale.com — passkey/2FA from your phone). Look at last seen times:

  • All home devices offline → power or ISP outage at the house. Nothing in the backup estate breaks from this: local backups pause and resume, retention absorbs a missed night. Ring whoever's home; worst case, wait.
  • Only ops offline → remote access and backups are down but the house is fine. Nothing you can do remotely without another LAN device — this is a when-home fix (or talk someone through power-cycling the OptiPlex).
  • Everything online but you can't connect → the problem is your end: your device's Tailscale is stopped (open the app, hit Connect — the #1 cause of "everything is broken" in this estate's history), or the venue's network blocks VPNs (try a phone hotspot).

2. Known silent killers (in likelihood order)

  1. Tailscale disconnected on your device — reconnect in the app.
  2. The ops node key expired — admin console shows it; re-authenticate the node from the console, or (better, permanently) disable key expiry for ops under Machines → key expiry settings.
  3. Router lost the subnet route after a UniFi update — admin console → Machines → ops → route settings → 192.168.1.0/24 toggle should be ON.

3. What NOT to do

  • Don't factory-reset or re-auth things that merely look offline.
  • Don't remove devices from the tailnet to "clean up" — that's how you lock yourself out properly.
  • Don't panic about backups: the daily digest on your phone tells you exactly which components missed a beat once things return.