virtuallypotato/content/posts/tailscale-on-vmware-photon/index.md

title: "Tailscale on VMware Photon OS" # Title of the blog post. date: 2022-12-14T10:21:12-06:00 # Date of post creation. <<<<<<< HEAD # lastmod: 2022-12-14T10:21:12-06:00 # Date when last modified ======= lastmod: 2022-12-15T10:21:12-06:00 # Date when last modified >>>>>>> main description: "How to manually install Tailscale on VMware's Photon OS - or any other systemd-based platform without official Tailscale packages." # Description used for search engine. featured: false # Sets if post is a featured post, making appear on the home page side bar. draft: false # Sets whether to render this page. Draft of true will not be rendered. toc: false # Controls if a table of contents should be generated for first-level links automatically. usePageBundles: true # menu: main # featureImage: "file.png" # Sets featured image on blog post. # featureImageAlt: 'Description of image' # Alternative text for featured image. # featureImageCap: 'This is the featured image.' # Caption (optional). <<<<<<< HEAD # thumbnail: "thumbnail.png" # Sets thumbnail image appearing inside card on homepage. ======= thumbnail: "Tailscale-AppIcon.png" # Sets thumbnail image appearing inside card on homepage. >>>>>>> main # shareImage: "share.png" # Designate a separate image for social media sharing. codeLineNumbers: false # Override global value for showing of line numbers within code block. series: Tips # Projects, Scripts, vRA8, K8s on vSphere tags: - vmware - linux - wireguard - networking - security - tailscale comment: true # Disable comment if false.

You might remember that I'm a pretty big fan of Tailscale, which makes it easy to connect your various devices together in a secure tailnet, or private network. Tailscale is super simple to set up on most platforms, but you'll need to install it manually if there isn't a prebuilt package for your system.

Here's a condensed list of the steps that I took to manually install Tailscale on VMware's Photon OS, though the same (or similar) steps should also work on just about any other systemd-based system.

1. Visit https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/#static to see the latest stable version for your system architecture, and copy the URL. For instance, I'll be using https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/tailscale_1.34.1_arm64.tgz.
2. Download and extract it to the system:

wget https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/tailscale_1.34.1_arm64.tgz
tar xvf tailscale_1.34.1_arm64.tgz
cd tailscale_1.34.1_arm64/

3. Install the binaries and service files:

sudo install -m 755 tailscale /usr/bin/
sudo install -m 755 tailscaled /usr/sbin/
<<<<<<< HEAD
sudo install -m 644 systemd/tailscaled_defaults /etc/defaults/tailscaled
=======
sudo install -m 644 systemd/tailscaled.defaults /etc/default/tailscaled
>>>>>>> main
sudo install -m 644 systemd/tailscaled.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/

4. Start the service:

sudo systemctl enable tailscaled
sudo systemctl start tailscaled

From that point, just sudo tailscale up like normal.

{{% notice info "Updating Tailscale" %}} Since Tailscale was installed outside of any package manager, it won't get updated automatically. When new versions are released you'll need to update it manually. To do that:

1. Download and extract the new version.
2. Install the tailscale and tailscaled binaries as described above (no need to install the service files again).
3. Restart the service with sudo systemctl restart tailscaled. {{% /notice %}}