Software Update: Tailscale 1.6.0

Tailscale is an application and service that allows you to easily connect computers on different networks without having to adjust anything in terms of network infrastructure at each location. It’s built on top WireGuard and simplifies setting up such networks by using various identity providers such as Google, Microsoft, Okta, OneLogin and SAP Identity Manager. For the differences between a network with WireGuard only and a network with WireGuard and Tailscale, we refer you to this faq. Depending on how you want to use Tailscale, there are cost be associated with. The developers released version 1.6.0 a few days ago with the following list of changes:

Headline Features

• exit nodes: route all your non-Tailscale internet traffic through another Tailscale node in your network; see our documentation and the video demo
• Tunneled IPv6: Tailscale has been able to use IPv6 as a transport for the WireGuard traffic for some time, but now we also support IPv6 inside the tunnel. All nodes that support IPv6 will have an IPv6 Tailscale address in addition to the normal 100.xyz Tailscale IPv4 (CGNAT) address.
• Port mapping: if your router supports NAT-PMP, Tailscale will now use it to make peer-to-peer connections. Many routers support this by default (such as Google Wifi). Others may require it to be enabled (eg in pfSense/OPNsense or Unifi/Ubiquiti “Services”). For some routers it may be lumped together with a “UPnP” checkbox. For pfSense/OPNsense users in particular, enabling NAT-PMP is highly recommended to be able to get direct connections between Tailscale nodes.
• User space networking is now possible with tailscaled using –tun=userspace-networking, which doesn’t require root.
  Known issue: userspace networking is not yet available on 32-bit CPUs, due to a bug in an upstream library. 32-bit support will be added in a future release.
• SOCKS5 server: the tailscaled binary now includes a SOCKS5 server. In particular, this allows a tailscaled using userspace networking to make outbound connections to other nodes in your Tailscale network, without your operating system’s help.
• Local API: tailscaled has the start of a node-local API. Currently the only interesting call is the whois method, to look up the Tailscale owner of a ip:port that’s hitting a local service. (which also works for incoming userspace-networking localhost-forwarded connections)

Bug fixes, improvements

• A DNS fallback mechanism lets Tailscale start on systems with broken or unavailable DNS (and potentially fix the DNS configuration, if you’ve configured Tailscale DNS settings).

Platform-specific

Windows

• In prior releases, the Tailscale background service and the GUI binary were the same binary. In Tailscale 1.6, the background service is now just the open source tailscaled.exe (which people can build themselves: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale#building). In summary there are three binaries:
  • tailscaled.exe (the open source daemon that does all the networking)
  • tailscale.exe (the open source CLI tool to control the daemon)
  • tailscale-ipn.exe (the GUI to control the daemon)
• The Windows service is now named just “Tailscale” (previously it was “Tailscale IPN”).
• The installer & uninstaller have been cleaned up and should now work correctly on multi-user Windows machines.

macOS

• tailscaled now runs on macOS: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-macOS
• the network link monitor was rewritten on macOS and should now adapt to changes quicker and from more parts of Tailscale, notably when the network is entirely unavailable (eg wifi is off).
• the Command-Q shortcut now works when the menu bar icon is open.

Synology

• The Synology packaging has been transferred to Tailscale’s GitHub organization (thanks, @nirev!) and Tailscale is now a co-maintainer (although we haven’t done much yet). We plan to upload Tailscale to the Synology Package Center once we polish some things (like adding a web UI for config), but for now the SPK packages are available from: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-synology/releases