July Tailscale newsletter

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It has been an eventful July for the team here — and we’ve been busy with new features (we have a status page), a new version (Tailscale v.1.28), and a growing learning library. Here’s all that, plus some of the meaningful contributions from our community that help make our vision of a more human internet possible.

Let’s jump in:

From the community

• The MV720 [video, English, transcription available]
  This Week in Tech hosts Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss MS Office VBA macros, Win 11 security changes, start button failure, and Tailscale in their latest podcast episode.

• Through the stack: Episode 17 — featuring Tailscale SSH
  Thomas Riboulet shares his thoughts on Ruby libraries, postmortems, and Tailscale SSH.

• Code-server, Caddy, Tailscale, and Hugo = My ultimate dev environment
  Chris Short shares his “ultimate development environment equivalent to nirvana.” We’re honored to be included.

• Private web-based IDE using Tailscale TLS Support
  Inspired by the Chris Short post above, Nahum Shalman documents how he’s using a private web-based IDE with Tailscale HTTPS.

• Kubernetes and OpenGitOps with Chris Short [audio, English, transcription available]
  For the Last Week in AWS podcast, Corey Quinn and Chris Short talk about GitOps and configuration management, and conclude their time with a discussion about connectivity and Tailscale. [Gee Chris, this newsletter isn’t short on your contributions!]

• Replacing SSH over Cloudflare with Tailscale
  Ben Butterworth originally used Cloudflare Tunnel to SSH into machines at home from other networks. But after a lively discussion on HackerNews, he decided to document switching to Tailscale SSH. This is a quick tutorial for anyone interested in doing the same.

• Unraid: Internet sharing and VPNs (MyServers, WireGuard, Tailscale, Duckdns) [video, German]
  The Geek Freaks demonstrate how to create an “extra-net” with WireGuard and Tailscale.

• Top 5 Home Assistant remote access methods [video, English]
  YouTuber Mostly Chris details his top 5 Home Assistant remote access methods, including Tailscale.

• A Tailscale package for pfsense Plus and CE [video, English]
  Christian McDonald debuts the new Tailscale package for pfsense Plus and CE. This is a detailed technical walkthrough for how to get started.

• Home Assistant remote access using Tailscale [video, English]
  Smart Home Addict shares an overview of Tailscale and walks through setting it up so you can access Home Assistant from outside your network.

• No more SSH private keys?! [video, English]
  Butter, What?! breaks down how Tailscale SSH makes SSH keys (almost) a thing of the past.

• Ansible collection includes a Tailscale inventory plugin
  Edward Muller shares their Ansible collection with a Tailscale inventory plugin.

• How to set up the Tailscale VPN and routing on pfsense
  Lawrence Systems offers a step-by-step guide for setting up Tailscale with pfsense.

• How to access GitLab on a private network with Tailscale
  With Tailscale, you can run GitLab at home and safely connect to it from outside your network. Brendan O’Leary explains how Tailscale lets him do it “with as little hassle as possible.”

• RainMachine and Tailscale
  Tailscale community member Robert shares how to install Tailscale on a RainMachine HD-12.

• Reddit: Question about Tailscale
  Perhaps our favorite question to answer: “IS IT REALLY THIS EASY?”

Want to be included in future Tailscale newsletters? Tag us in your rant, guides, or tutorials on Twitter.

From the team

• Putting Tailscale on the Steam Deck
  Learn how Member of Technical Staff Xe Iaso put Tailscale on a Steam Deck and is no longer having to mess with authentication and SSH keys just to copy over a Skyrim mod or two.

• The Past, Present, and Future of Supply Chain Security [video, English]
  A talk by Dan Lorenc, with moderation by Tailscale Product Manager Maya Kaczorowski.

Tailscale IRLish

• The Sheer Terror of PAM
  Tune in on August 5th to catch Member of Technical Staff Xe Iaso @RustConf 2022 and learn all about the PAM API, how PAM actually works, how to meet that API in Rust so you can write your own authentication logic, and more.

What’s new and improved

• Tailscale for DevOps: On-demand access to your Tailscale resources with Indent
  Tailscale simplifies network and SSH connections between devices. We partnered with Indent, and now those connections can be approved and time-bound.

  Explore Indent’s interactive demo of this integration over at their website:

  

  You can use Indent to request access to anything in your Tailscale network, whether it’s a sensitive internal web-based tool, internal API, or production SSH access. By using Indent with Tailscale, you can:

  • React to incidents faster with production access auto-approvals for on-call teams
  • Get temporary access to run a production database migration
  • View server logs or debug data to fix an issue without retaining persistent access

  See the documentation to get started managing access to Tailscale resources with Indent.

• Status page
  🎉 Our status page is live!

Tailscale v1.28

• Tailscale v1.28 arrived this month and is available on all clients (see our updated instructions).

• This version has a handful of fixes and updates that are listed fully on our changelog.

Tailscale learning library

• We are building a learning library to help folks at any stage in their career. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered, send us a tweet @Tailscale.

  • How to manage multiple cloud resources
  • Ultimate guide to better DevOps
  • Privileged access management
  • Principle of least privilege
  • Why do I need split DNS?
  • IPv4 vs. IPv6 FAQ

That’s all for now. Stay well!