March Tailscale newsletter

Ross Zurowski on
Photo of Ross Zurowski
This is a re-publishing of our monthly newsletter sent to subscribers earlier this month. Sign up to receive future email newsletters.

We’ve got lots of content and product updates to share this month, so we’ll jump right in.

Community Writing

From the Tailscale team

Tailscale v1.6

The latest version of Tailscale is available today! Learn how to update or read the full release notes on GitHub.

The flagship feature for this release is IPv6 support inside the tunnel (v1.6… IPv6… get it?) Supporting IPv6 inside the tunnel means we can finally build a feature we’ve been excited to share for some time: exit nodes.

Screenshot of Tailscale v1.6

Exit Nodes

By default, Tailscale is an overlay network: it routes and secures traffic between devices running Tailscale, but doesn’t touch your public internet traffic, such as when you visit Google or Twitter. In most cases, this is the right move. Communication between private devices (company servers, home computers) needs to be secured, but there’s no need to add extra layers of encryption or latency for a public internet connection.

However, there may be times when you do want Tailscale to route your public internet traffic: in a cafe with untrusted Wi-Fi, or when traveling overseas and needing access to an online service (such as banking) only available in your home country.

Exit nodes lets you opt-in to routing all non-Tailscale internet traffic through a specific device (an “exit node”) on your network.

Learn more from our documentation, or watch our demo video to see it in action →

Admin Console Updates

Alongside our client changes, we’ve also made a few small updates to the admin console.

A set of devices, like from the admin console, some showing ACL tags like tag:server, and tag:production.

The admin console now shows any ACL tags claimed by machines on your network.

ACL Tags let you define custom permissions for machines without inheriting permissions from the user who authenticated it. For example, tagging web server machines with tag:server means you can restrict them to only see a database server, without applying those restrictions to the administrator who configured the server.

This addition should make it vastly easier to configure (and debug) tags across your network.

A green dot with the text 'connected' demonstrating the new last seen indicator in the admin console.

And a long-overdue update to the way we display the “last seen” timestamp on the machines page means you can quickly scan through the list to see which devices are currently connected.

We hope you enjoy this release. We’d love to hear any feedback you have about how we can make Tailscale better. Send us an email or reply to @Tailscale on Twitter.

That’s all for now — stay well!

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