u/MallicSmith

Deleted my original post because it took a direction that didn't assist me whatsoever. I would like to use my cellphone with the tailscale app on it to be able to be used with hotspot/tethering to talk to other devices in the tailnet. I believe this is the purpose of the subnet routing function of tailscale, namely to allow devices connected to the subnet router to traverse the tailnet as if they themselves had tailscale installed and we part of the tailnet.

Is my interpretation of this function correct, or completely off base? If I am correct, can someone enumerate the correct procedure to set this up? I tried using the official guide but it didn't seem to work.

My set up with fake IPs for example.
Desktop x.x.x.2
Server x.x.x.3
Cellphone x.x.x.4

My desktop can connect to the server. My cellphone can connect to the server. However, when tethering the cellphone to a windows device, the device goes out through the broader network and does not attempt to send connections through the tailscale VPN. I am trying to do this so that I can use the client device to access RDP on my server which I have locked down to only allow incoming connections from the tailscale subnet.

So I tried to read the official documentation for how to set this up, and I am failing at every turn to get it to work properly.

I have a work laptop in which our security policy prevents me from installing the tailscale client on it. I'd still like to be able to connect the laptop to my tailscale network so I can remote into my servers securely. I have my android cellphone with subnet router enabled. I have the subnet approved in the tailscale admin client. Disconnecting the windows laptop from any network other than being tethered/wifi hotspotted to the cellphone. For some reason it seems like the laptop keeps grabbing an IP from the hotspot/tether, and not grabbing any form of internal IP from the tailscale subnet and as a result, I cannot connect to any of the other tailscale clients in my tailnet. I'm sure there is some step I am utterly failing to do, but I can't figure out what. Access rules shouldn't be a problem because my home PC can talk to my server just fine without any tweaks to rules. I've got it set up by default that any device in the tailnet can talk to each other.