Blog

This Thanksgiving, Tailscale is thankful for all the people whose code we build upon. One might say we stand upon the shoulders of giants, but looking at our dependencies, a castell might be more accurate. In any case, we couldn’t have done it alone. As a small gesture of gratitude, we’re giving out free Personal Pro accounts to people who’ve contributed to Tailscale’s repos or to code that Tailscale depends on, even if it was written years before Tailscale existed. If you log in to the Tailscale admin panel and you’re on our list, a “Thanks!” heart will appear in the top right corner, letting you upgrade to Personal Pro for free. If you don’t see a heart, though, we might’ve missed you or have you under a different account or account type. If you’re either the creator of or a past or current notable contributor to code we use, please contact us with details and we’ll update our list and make sure the Gmail or GitHub account you want to use with Tailscale is on our list.

We’ve added more user roles to make it easier to manage access to your network. Now, in addition to your tailnet Owner, Admins, and Members, you can give users the roles of Network Admin, IT Admin, and Auditor. This lets users access the admin console without the full permissions of an Admin.

Have you moved to a remote development environment? In reality, you can rarely develop fully in isolation—you need access to internal tools and services to make sure your code works as expected. So although your development environment moved, well, it’s likely nothing else did.

If you already didn’t have a great way to access internal development resources before, then having an ephemeral VM in a cloud provider spinning up and down as you need it for development doesn’t make that any easier. Especially if it’s not just your development environment, but every user in your organization’s.

Luckily, Tailscale works as part of a devcontainer with a reusable auth key, so that every GitHub Codespace you spin up can automatically connect to your tailnet. You can use Tailscale to access resources on your tailnet, or to share your development environment with others.

When you’re developing software, you need to access all kinds of resources, including package registries, container image registries, databases, and other network services. You want to work with those services securely and with low latency, wherever they are, even if they’re behind a firewall or don’t have a public IP address. Most importantly, though, you need to be able to access your coworkers: when you need a code review, or you’re pair programming, you want to be able to easily share your development environment with others so they can see what you’re working on. From a development workspace in Coder, you can access resources you need for development, and share what you’re working with your coworkers with Tailscale.

Remote development is hard. You need access to all the things from wherever you happen to be working from this week. It could be a coffee shop, the train, or even (gasp!) the office. In an ideal world, it shouldn’t take longer to gain access to what you need to get your work done, including cloud and on-prem resources, than it does to complete the tasks at hand.

Developing remotely should be a boon, not a bottleneck, that’s why we’re excited to partner with Gitpod. We aim to make it easy to connect a running workspace in Gitpod to your resources and your colleagues using Tailscale—with Tailscale available by default in Gitpod workspaces, and Gitpod free for a year to Tailscale customers.

The world doesn’t need more words about remote meetings. So here’s a picture:

Tailscale is officially supported in the Synology package center. Tailscale + Synology makes it effortless to securely access your Synology NAS from anywhere in the world, on any device. You can also use it as a relay back to other devices on your LAN.

Given that this week is the epic all-things-cloud-native reunion in LA, we thought we might crash your little party and mention that Tailscale already works well with containers and Kubernetes. Many of us here at Tailscale used to work on Kubernetes, and keep it close to our hearts even if we’re not at KubeCon this week (and sorry, we love YAML, but use HuJSON now).

Tailscale 1.16 is out! The latest Linux, Windows, and Android clients are available today (see our update instructions), while macOS and iOS will be available over the next few days, pending App Store reviews.

We break down the work that’s happened in and around the release of Tailscale 1.16.

We’ve made a few settings easier for you to manage in the admin console: device authorization and key expiry.

Tailscale on iOS runs as a special kind of app, a Network Extension. This lets us run in the background, so we can secure traffic from all of your applications, without them having to change anything. But with this power comes a memory straightjacket. Normal iOS apps can use 5GB or so of memory before iOS kills them. We get 15MB. With an “M”.

That has been a constant pain point for our users—and especially for us. When we use too much memory, iOS snipes our network extension, and your VPN access goes down. And the knowledge that doing more work caused more crashes caused us to leave important improvements out of the iOS app, like http2 and UPnP support. It was a constant low level drain on our engineering team and our product.

This blog post is about how we tackled the problem, with a bit of philosophizing and a surprise twist at the end.

Due to recent changes in Windows Update, upgrading the operating system on a Windows 10 or Windows 11 machine running Tailscale may break Tailscale connectivity. If this happens, your machine will no longer be able to connect to your tailnet. To avoid this issue, upgrade Tailscale on your Windows machines to Tailscale 1.14.4 or later before running Windows Update.

Connections between Tailscale nodes are already secured with end-to-end encryption—that’s a huge benefit of being built on WireGuard. However, browsers are not aware of that because they rely on verifying the TLS certificate of a domain.

To protect a website with an HTTPS URL, you need a TLS certificate from a public Certificate Authority. Tailscale now makes that easily available for the machines in your Tailscale network, also known as a tailnet, with certificates provisioned from Let’s Encrypt.

Tailscale loves open source. We know that it can be tough to develop a project in the open, and collaborate with individuals and organizations around the world.

We’re excited to announce that Tailscale is free for GitHub organizations using Tailscale for open source projects. And given Tailscale is good at, well, making connections, friends and family who coordinate using GitHub organization accounts can also benefit from this free plan.

I have a soft spot for the Unix sockets API. Yes, it is clunky to get started and has grown some odd options over the decades. It is usually buried now under higher level programming layers. But at the heart of it is a small and versatile interface that is easy to build on and easy to recreate: read(socket, bytes) write(socket, bytes) What bytes, how many bytes, and in what order are up to you. Under the hood TCP gives you reliable transmission. It is a quick and fun way to write a network program. Streams of bytes can contain discrete request-response messages, be used as a message bus, A/V streams, they can be multiplexed and demultiplexed… there are many ways to use them. As a bonus, most programming languages can represent streams of bytes efficiently, so sockets make for good protocol boundaries. It also has the great benefit of being a stable technology.

A few months back we released a GitHub Action to make it easier for you to access Tailscale. This allows a GitHub Action you’re running to first connect to Tailscale using an ephemeral authentication key, then perform other steps. Ephemeral auth keys clean up their state after the runner finishes, meaning you’re not persisting a connection to your network.

We’re excited that our GitHub Action is now available in the marketplace! This means that with the Connect Tailscale action, you can easily pull this into whatever actions you write.

Most of us have heard of role-based access control (RBAC) and its slightly updated successor, attribute-based access control (ABAC). But we don’t always appreciate all the great ideas they contain.

Today, we’re announcing a new pricing model for Tailscale that makes it less expensive for everyone, and easier to scale from a small test deployment to something your whole friend group, startup, or organization can use.

Check out the new pricing, or read on for details about what’s changed and why.

A lot of people use Tailscale with Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. In an effort to make this technology more accessible we’re publishing this transcript of a conversation about the basics of Network Attached Storage between our past co-op student Naman Sood, and our Archmage of Infrastructure, Christine Dodrill. Enjoy!