Add tailscale to an EdgeRouter and surviving system upgrade

adding-tailscale-to-edgerouter.md

Adding tailscale to an EdgeRouter (and surviving system upgrades)

I suggest you run sudo bash on all of these so you're the root user.

Installing

1. Download tailscale and put the files in /config/. Find the latest stable or unstable version for your EdgeRouter's processor (ex. ER4 is mips and ERX is mipself)

sudo bash    # if you havent already
curl https://pkgs.tailscale.com/unstable/tailscale_XYZ_mips.tgz | tar xvz -C /tmp
cp /tmp/tailscale_*/* /tmp/tailscale_*/systemd/* /config/

2. Create the /config/scripts/firstboot.d/tailscale.sh file which gets run once every system upgrade. Reminder that /config survives upgrades. Don't forget to set the execute flag on the script inside firstboot.d

cat << EOF > /config/scripts/firstboot.d/tailscale.sh
#!/bin/sh
ln -s /config/tailscaled.service /lib/systemd/system/tailscaled.service
ln -s /config/tailscaled.defaults /etc/default/tailscaled
ln -s /config/tailscale /usr/bin/tailscale
ln -s /config/tailscaled /usr/sbin/tailscaled
mkdir -p /var/lib/tailscale/
touch /config/auth/tailscaled.state
chmod 0400 /config/auth/tailscaled.state
ln -s /config/auth/tailscaled.state /var/lib/tailscale/tailscaled.state
systemctl enable --now tailscaled
EOF
chmod +x /config/scripts/firstboot.d/tailscale.sh

3. And run this script now to get things going (or manually run the commands if you'd like), and then run tailscale up to login. Feel free to use other parameters like tailscale up --advertise-routes=10.0.1.0/24

/config/scripts/firstboot.d/tailscale.sh
tailscale up

4. That's it, you're done! If you found this useful, i'd super appreciate if you could Star up top. Like everyone, I like Internet points too! :)

 

Upgrading to a new version

1. Download the version you want into a folder like /tmp and then copy the binaries over. Perhaps in future versions there may be more/less files or config changes, so make sure you take a look at what's now.

sudo bash    # if you havent already
curl https://pkgs.tailscale.com/unstable/tailscale_XYZ_mips.tgz | tar xvz -C /tmp
systemctl disable --now tailscaled
cp /tmp/tailscale_*/{tailscale,tailscaled} /config/
systemctl enable --now tailscaled

 

Removing

1. Stop the service if its still running

sudo bash    # if you havent already
systemctl disable --now tailscaled

2. Delete all the files tailscale uses

rm /lib/systemd/system/tailscaled.service
rm /etc/default/tailscaled
rm /usr/bin/tailscale
rm /usr/sbin/tailscaled
rm -rf /var/lib/tailscale

3. Remove your configs and persistent files (this includes your tailscaled.state which has your private key)

rm /config/tailscale*
rm /config/auth/tailscaled.state
rm /config/scripts/firstboot.d/tailscale.sh