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A combination of our newsletter and other posts, where we talk about Tailscale, WireGuard®, 2-factor auth, and other networking-related topics.

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Rolling out the red carpet for remote meetings

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

Tailscale team members queued on a red carpet in front of a microphone

Tailscale joins the Synology Package Center

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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.

You can use Tailscale with Kubernetes, you know

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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 v1.16

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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.

Enable device approval and set key expiry in the admin console

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

Authentication Settings in the admin console showing the new options.

Hey linker, can you spare a meg?

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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.

September Tailscale newsletter

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A new month, a new set of updates! The team has been busy building new features, including HTTPS certificate support and GitHub Marketplace integration. We also launched free pricing for open source GitHub orgs.

Action required: Upgrade Tailscale to 1.14.4+ prior to updating Windows

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Maya Kaczorowski on

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.

Provision TLS certificates for your internal Tailscale services

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.

Even more for free: Tailscale for open source projects

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.

We get stuck opening the socket

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David Crawshaw on
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.

Private DNS with MagicDNS

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MagicDNS runs a DNS server on each Tailscale device to quickly and securely serve DNS.

Connect a GitHub Action to your Tailscale network — now in GitHub marketplace!

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.

RBAC like it was meant to be

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Avery Pennarun on

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.

August Tailscale newsletter

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This month’s newsletter has guides on running Tailscale on a Mango Router, running a Minecraft server on Tailscale, how to manage a Windows Firewall from Go, and Tailscale v1.14.

Programming the Windows firewall

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An introduction to the Windows Filtering Platform, and how to make your software program the Windows firewall.

July Tailscale newsletter

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Lots of community contributions to highlight this month! Thank you to everyone writing and sharing their enthusiasm for Tailscale. This month includes a community AWS Lambda Layer for Tailscale, Tailscale v1.12, and Taildrop for Android.

How to set up a private Minecraft server

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This post will guide you through the process on how to set up a secure, fast, and private Minecraft server with Tailscale.

June Tailscale newsletter

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It has been another productive month for the team here at Tailscale, and we are brimming with community contributions including a getting started video tutorial from David Burgess and a new guide by Justin Rhee on setting up a Tailscale VPN on Kubernetes. Let us jump in!

New Pricing

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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. What’s new? We have an all new set of plans — we’re replacing our current Connectivity and Business plans with the new Team plan and Business plan. We’re also now providing an annual billing option, which gives two months off whichever plan you choose. When billed annually, the Team plan is $5/user/month, and the Business plan is $15/user/month, up to 50% less than before. Device limits For team plans, device limits now scale with the size of your network. Previously, teams were stuck at a flat limit of 100 devices or 500 devices depending on their plan. Now, for each user you add to your network, your device limits grows too.

Tailscale v1.10 & GitHub Auth

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Tailscale 1.10 is now available on all platforms (pending iOS approval to the App Store — we expect it to go through this weekend). Learn how to update or read on for details. While this was generally a bug fix and cleanup release, a few noteworthy changes happened in and around this release worth highlighting.

Taildrop was kind of easy, actually

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Taildrop was the first test of an experimental p2p app discovery layer in Tailscale. Let’s talk about why it was so easy to build, and where we go from here.

How to access your NAS drive remotely

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Use Tailscale to set up your NAS for access from any device

NAS 101: An intro chat about Network Attached Storage

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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, Xe Iaso. Enjoy!

May Tailscale newsletter

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This has been a busy month, with the launch of Tailscale v1.8 and a new feature, Taildrop, that lets you easily send files between your devices.

Sending Files with Taildrop

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Taildrop is a feature that makes it easy to send files between your personal devices on a Tailscale network. Unlike cloud-based file transfer services, Taildrop’s peer-to-peer design makes it well-suited for lots of kinds of files you might want to send.

The long wondrous life of a Tailscale packet

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We track a single packet from creation in one process to arrival in another, far away.

Using GitHub Actions and Tailscale to build and deploy applications securely

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Automating deployment of a web server using GitHub Actions should be DevOps 101, so as a university student, it is the perfect time for me to be learning this. But what if, for security reasons, the server is accessible only over Tailscale?

Tailscale v1.8 is here!

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The latest version of Tailscale is available today! Learn how to update or read the full release notes on Github. This release contains a lot of general improvements, along with support for some upcoming feature previews.

April Tailscale newsletter

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April has us hard at work on our 1.8 stable release. We’ve got lots of great community contributions to highlight this month.

The Sisyphean Task Of DNS Client Config on Linux

Xe Iaso and David Anderson on
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A brief history of DNS on Linux systems and what steps we are taking to ensure it is configured consistently in Tailscale 1.8.

March Tailscale newsletter

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March brings Tailscale v1.6, including IPv6 support, exit nodes, netstack integration, and more. We also have writing about using Tailscale to create a Dropbox-like system, and details about the new library Tailscale uses for IP addresses behind the scenes.

netaddr.IP: a new IP address type for Go

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The Go standard library’s net.IP type is problematic for a number of reasons. We wrote a new one.

Key management characteristics of the Tailscale Control Protocol

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David Crawshaw on

Tailscale is split into a control plane and a data plane. The data plane is built out of direct WireGuard links that provides end-to-end encryption between any two machines on the network. The control plane is responsible for verifying the identity of users, validating machine keys, and delivering the public keys of peers to each machine in the network. This document focuses on the management of keys in the control plane. For a broader overview of Tailscale, see “How Tailscale Works.”

Modules, monoliths, and microservices

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Lately, I get people asking me when microservices are a good idea. In systems design explains the world, I talked about big-picture issues like second system effect, innovator’s dilemmas, and more. Can systems design answer the microservices question?

Yes, but you might not like the answers. First, we'll need some history.

How often should I rotate my ssh keys?

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Avery Pennarun on

If you’re like most people, your answer to this is… “What? Why?”

When ssh was introduced back in the 1990s, its appeal was simple. Passwords are too short, too guessable, too phishable, too often stored incorrectly, too MITM-able, too brute-forceable. Also its primary competition was rsh’s classic “no authentication,” but we don’t talk about that.

February Tailscale newsletter

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This past month we announced our sharing beta, released v1.4, and have a slew of new writing and podcasts about Tailscale to share with you all.

Philosophy of Tailscale: Social proximity networks

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Tailscale enables you to create networks between people you are close to. This article spells out our philosophy of social proximity networks as opposed to physical proximity networks you use today.

Sharing over Tailscale

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Today, we’re launching sharing as a public beta feature. Sharing lets youinvite users outside your network to access your private devices securely.It makes it easy to host game servers with friends, host open-source softwarefor family, collaborate with contractors, and much more.

Tailscale on NixOS: A new Minecraft server in ten minutes

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How to provision a new NixOS machine on Digital Ocean with nixos-infect and automatically connect it to your Tailscale network, then use that server to set up a fully private Minecraft world.

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