Install Tailscale

By Dan Aukes

Prerequisites

If you have a raspberry pi or docker image, you may need to install curl first:

sudo apt install -y curl -y

Generic Install script

Warning: Never do this if you don’t trust the source and haven’t inspected the script.

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

Starting

Start up tailscale with

sudo tailscale up

Follow the on-screen instructions. You may have to copy/paste the link into your host’s browser.

Options

Good things to do once you have added your computer to your tailnet is to:

disable key expiry

  1. open up https://login.tailscale.com/admin/machines,
  2. click on the ... button next to the desired computer
  3. select “disable key expiry”

turn on magic dns

If using a service like tailscale, you can also enable their “magic dns” option, which makes devices on your “tailnet” available using their names on tailscale.

  1. go to: https://login.tailscale.com/admin/dns
  2. turn on “Enable Magic DNS”

Go here to learn more about setting it up: https://tailscale.com/kb/1081/magicdns

I’ve found that this service sometimes does not work from within larger managed networks. In this case, a hard-coded /etc/hosts file will still work.

Delete tailscale cache

sudo tailscale down
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/tailscale

External references