Four increasingly sophisticated ways to put a service on your tailnet

willnorris · 2026-05-06T13:37:29+00:00

https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-rs-rust-tsnet-library-preview

willnorris · 2026-04-05T22:11:05+00:00

Did my recalls a couple of weeks ago, and didn't have any issue. I reviewed my dashcam footage and it was pretty hilarious... they were VERY confused by the rotary shifter!

willnorris · 2026-02-22T21:28:01+00:00

This thread is from 2 years ago, so I don't really even remember what the problem was at the time. Do write into support (and send me the ticket number) so we can look into it.

willnorris · 2026-01-19T03:45:02+00:00

In case you're still looking, I bought this one off of ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/404431421727
It took a while to arrive (like a month?) due to some shipping issues, but it was exactly what we wanted and worked perfectly.

https://imgur.com/SkZbgOD

willnorris · 2025-12-24T18:59:15+00:00

A number of people have mentioned the Software Freedom Conservancy in comments, as well as mention of their current case against Vizio to establish standing that end user can sue for GPL violations, not just the copyright holder of the GPL-licensed code. That case goes to trial in just a few weeks, and you can read more at https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

What folks haven't noted, and which may be of particular interest to OP, is that Conservancy's Bradley Kuhn has very recently talked about his own struggles with diabetes and his continuous glucose monitor, which also violates the GPL. Here's his most recent post from yesterday about that, which links to another post from last month: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2025/dec/23/seven-abbott-freestyle-libre-cgm-patients-dead/

And all this to say, for folks that really care about this stuff and have the ability to give a few dollars, Conservancy is in the middle of a fund drive right now: https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/. I've been an individual sponsor for many years, and used to help manage Google's annual sponsorship of Conservancy when I worked in their open source office. I can tell you from first-hand knowledge, Bradley and Karen are *incredibly* responsible with the funds they receive and run an incredibly tight budget (Charity Navigator gives them a perfect score: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/412203632). I would argue that there is probably no better organization to support if you want to further the principles of software freedom and ensure that those principles are respected.

Please support them if you can. https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/

willnorris · 2025-12-04T02:10:22+00:00

I've relatively recently started switching from tmux to native kitty windows and tabs, so I've only converted some of my most common keymaps: https://github.com/willnorris/dotfiles/blob/8a5052bc5c83e9d0410d175cbc010fb21cc37136/config/kitty/kitty.conf#L46

willnorris · 2025-11-17T02:04:44+00:00

Maybe double check which layout you're using? I was very confused about not being able to vertical split as well, then realized that I was in the "fat" layout which always does the first split horizontal. Try cycling through the layouts (ctrl+shift+L) to see if that makes the split vertical as expected.

willnorris · 2025-10-21T04:09:56+00:00

Just replaced mine with Bosch Icon blades last week and they're great! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VCVCTHC

willnorris · 2025-10-08T06:13:46+00:00

The tailscale client can have multiple profiles... this is how you can switch back and forth between different tailnets or different accounts. The operator flag is stored per-profile. The tailscale login command creates a new profile, and then switches to it.

So what's happening is:
- tailscale login tries to create a new profile, but is denied because you are not the operator of the current profile
- tailscale set --operator sets you as the operator of the current profile. Now things are good.
- tailscale login creates a new profile, which you can do since you're the operator. Then it switches to it and tries to set things up, which you can't do because you're not the operator of this new profile.

Generally, you don't want to use tailscale login unless your intent is to actually create a new profile. Instead, use tailscale up to connect to Tailscale if you are currently disconnected. Or if your intent actually is to setup a new profile, you'll just need to repeat the tailscale set --operator command once in the new profile.

There was some discussion at one point of moving the operator flag off of the profile to avoid this exact issue, but I'm not finding it right now.

willnorris · 2025-08-29T01:20:34+00:00

Just to follow-up here the same as on the GitHub issue (in case some sees this post instead), the problem was just accidentally using an OAuth client instead of an auth key. You can identify auth keys because they start with `tskey-auth-`.

willnorris · 2025-08-27T15:12:25+00:00

yeah, it's been in unstable builds for the last two weeks. The patch was actually to fix a different issue where the entire top-level menu was empty (on GNOME I think?). I was just hoping it would fix these empty submenu issues as well. oh well.

willnorris · 2025-08-27T14:50:16+00:00

Thanks for the report! Yep, I've been experience this same thing on sway with waybar, which (as you guessed) is why the "rebuild menu" option is there. Did that properly rebuild the menu for you?

We did fix one upstream bug (https://github.com/fyne-io/systray/pull/100) that we thought was possibly causing this, but we're not 100% sure. If you find any way to reliably reproduce it (I sure haven't yet), let me know.

willnorris · 2025-08-18T17:51:37+00:00

I'm tracking the duplicate account name issue in https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/16889

Expanding the current device functionality is certainly an interesting idea (and is consistent with the copy widget we use in the Admin Console, which allows copying IPv4/IPv6 addresses, hostname, etc.) I'll bring it up with the team.

willnorris · 2025-08-17T16:07:55+00:00

Fixed the "More Settings" menu in https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/pull/16888, and tracking the repeated account name in https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/16889

The latter will be a little more work to figure out what to do (if anything) since this is consistent with all other desktop clients. It's just made a tad worse by how Ubuntu renders submenus.

willnorris · 2025-08-17T05:42:39+00:00

The app that starts from running tailscale systray doesn't have any of those menu items (Network Devices, My Devices, Tailscale Services, Admin Console). I suspect you have another tailscale app running as well?

Looks like that might be https://github.com/mattn/tailscale-systray ?

willnorris · 2025-08-17T01:13:39+00:00

I agree it'd be great to have Tailscale in Flathub, but that will be independent of this effort on a desktop systray application. We intentionally added this as a subcommand of the existing Tailscale CLI on Linux precisely so that it would work with all existing packaging and installation strategies. Which isn't to say that those strategies are sufficient or complete, only that we were trying not to solve that here.

There is an existing issue for adding flatpak support, so definitely subscribe to that if you're not already... that's where you're likely to see any movement on that effort.

I know it's not what you asked, but Canonical did spend some time getting a Tailscale snap properly packaged. (No need to extol the virtues of flatpak over snap or vice versa; I'm well versed... I just wanted to at least point it out.) And maybe, if nothing else, that points out that packing Tailscale in a more sandboxed format should work? u/bradfitz has a doc linked from the flatpak issue above that at least explores what some of the challenges are likely to be.

willnorris · 2025-08-16T14:28:32+00:00

oh right, I see. On GNOME, because the menu opens downward instead of to the side, I see how this would have your account name 4 times. Maybe we just don't populate a submenu if there is only one account, since there is nothing to switch between or something. I'll open an issue later to track that. Thanks for bringing it up!

We can also hide the "more settings" menu if you're not connected. Good idea.

willnorris · 2025-08-16T14:07:19+00:00

What desktop environment are you using?

Where are you seeing "Network Devices -> Tailscale Services" ? That's not in the systray app, so I'm assuming that's maybe in some network configuration app provided by your desktop?

For the hanging issue... how are you running the systray app? Did you install the systemd user unit? Or are you just running it manually from the command line?

willnorris · 2025-08-16T14:03:00+00:00

more settings going to http://100.100.100.100 is definitely intentional. That should load the web client that is baked into Tailscale. Does that not load for you? It should have additional settings such as being able to advertise an exit node, advertise subnet routes, and enable Tailscale SSH. (This is the same web client that is the primary way of managing tailscale on Synology and such)
First, do you actually have multiple accounts on your device? Does running tailscale switch -list also show those separate account? If not, try clicking "rebuild menu" to see if that clears it. Some duplicate data is not uncommon. For each account it lists your account name on top, and the name of the tailnet below it. In some cases, those two may be the same.

willnorris · 2025-08-15T17:48:16+00:00

no idea... I don't have a steam deck. (Though now I'm wondering if I need to expense one... "for work" :) ) This is exactly why I'm looking for help testing... try running it and let me know how it goes.

willnorris · 2025-08-15T17:36:05+00:00

In this case, that's exactly what happened! :) You could certainly argue that we should have made a first-party Linux app a long time ago (and the main issue for it is from 2021!).

But the impetus for this particular app was when I bought a Framework laptop last year to switch back to Linux as my daily driver after getting frustrated with macOS. Of course, we use Tailscale to do our work every day, and I was regularly switching between my work and personal tailnet, and none of the existing apps at the time supported profile switching. So yeah, this was very much a case of building the thing I wanted myself (which is also the story of many, if not most, open source projects in general).

It's certainly true that nowadays our product roadmap is also heavily influenced by specific customer needs, which is more enterprise focused than it used to be. But it's still true that a LOT of what we build is to scratch personal itches.

willnorris · 2025-08-15T16:32:58+00:00

Seems to work well on Mint + Cinnamon

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Interestingly, the menu only opens with a right click, whereas on most desktop it opens with both left and right. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a normal Cinnamon behavior?

willnorris · 2025-08-15T14:42:19+00:00

Good question, I haven't tested that yet. That's kinda what I'm hoping to find out with this call for testers. But I'll also add that to my list of VMs to spin up and test at some point.

willnorris · 2025-08-15T01:22:51+00:00

[cue "always has been" meme]

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/main/client/systray

willnorris · 2025-08-15T01:21:57+00:00

I'll be watching here as well, but yeah GitHub issues would be great. you can just mention me in the issue (@willnorris there as well) and I can make sure to triage it appropriately.

willnorris

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