Tickets, Tunnels, and Tailscale: Journey to Simple Theater Connectivity

When I started working on a theater management system in Nepal, I faced a big headache: offline-first devices. Each ticket counter needed to work independently, sync when connected, and somehow stay accessible for remote management.

The theaters had unreliable internet, multiple ticket counters, zero IT staff on-site, and a central server that needed remote access.

The Connectivity Nightmare

Traditional solutions required port forwarding (security nightmare), static IPs (expensive), VPN servers (complex), or DDNS services (unreliable).

Every theater was a new puzzle. Different ISPs, different routers, different problems.

Enter Tailscale

Tailscale changed everything. It creates a secure mesh network between all your devices, no matter where they are.

# On each device
curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo tailscale up

That's it. Every device can now talk to every other device, securely, through any firewall.

What This Enabled

The Offline-First Challenge

Even with Tailscale, theaters sometimes lose internet. The solution:

public class TicketService
{
    public async Task SellTicket(TicketRequest request)
    {
        // Always save locally first
        var ticket = await <em>localDb.SaveTicket(request);
        // Queue for sync when online
        await </em>syncQueue.Enqueue(ticket);
    }
}

Lessons Learned

Theaters across Nepal now sell tickets reliably, sync when possible, and require zero on-site IT support.