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Keep NAS shares mounted on a Mac at home and away (LAN and Tailscale)

Use the fast local address at home and your Tailscale name everywhere else, without ejecting and reconnecting every time you leave the house.

The problem

At home your NAS answers at a local address like 192.168.1.10 or nas.local. Away from home it answers through Tailscale (or another VPN) at a name like nas.tail1234.ts.net. Finder mounts a share from one address, so every time you switch networks the share breaks and you reconnect with the other address by hand.

Fallback hosts

velcro lets one share have several hosts. It tries them in order and mounts from the first one that answers on the share’s port:

velcro add smb://me@192.168.1.10/home nas.tail1234.ts.net

When the share drops because you left the house, velcro reconnects through Tailscale. When you come back and the Tailscale mount drops, it reconnects through the LAN. A share that’s still working stays where it is; eject it if you want velcro to reconnect through a faster route.

Put the right host first

velcro connects to the first host that answers. A private address like 192.168.1.10 can belong to a stranger’s device on café or hotel Wi‑Fi. If you travel, list a name only your own network resolves first (a Tailscale MagicDNS name, or a .local Bonjour name), or put the private IP last.

Use SMB over Tailscale, not NFS

SMB needs a single port, 445, which Tailscale passes without extra setup. The macOS NFS client is effectively NFSv3 and needs several more ports (rpcbind, mountd, lockd) that often don’t make it across a VPN. NFS’s usual sys security also trusts any machine with an allowed IP address to say which user it is.

Questions

Does velcro need Tailscale?
No. Fallback hosts work with any route to your server: a second LAN address, a VPN, or a DNS name. Tailscale is just a common setup.