How to manually install tailscale

Coffee break
1

Greetings. I’m one of those guys that “came here from Lunduke” btw.

I’ve been busy reinstalling my systems with OpenMandriva and ran into a critical roadblock with tailscale when installing via their script (something about a “GPG signature verification error”). I’m lazy and don’t have time to figure it out (and didn’t find any tailscale topics in the OMAlx forums) so I just installed tailscale from their static binaries. Here’s how I did it in Rome (I’m guessing it should also work in Rock).

  1. Grab the static binaries from the tailscale website:
    https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/#static
    (I downloaded amd64)
  2. Unpack with tar xvf tailscale_VERSION_ARCH.tgz
  3. CD into the unpacked folder. Inside the folder you will find 2 binaries and a systemd sub-folder. You will need to manually copy these files into your OpenManrdiva filesystem (with sudo):
    a) Copy the binaries tailscale and tailscaled to /usr/bin
    b) CD into the systemd folder. Rename “tailscaled.defaults” to “tailscaled” and then copy it to /etc/default
    c) Copy tailscaled.service to /etc/systemd/system
  4. Configure systemd to run tailscale automatically. Run the following commands in order (enter password when prompted):
    a) systemctl daemon-reload
    b) systemctl enable tailscaled.service (…enables the tailscaled service)
    c) systemctl is-enabled tailscaled.service (…checks to see that the service is enabled)
    d) systemctl start tailscaled.service (…starts the tailscaled service)
    e) systemctl status tailscaled.service (…confirms if the service is active and running)
  5. If you didn’t see any errors and the tailscaled service is running and active, you can then proceed to bring tailscale up:
    sudo tailscale up
  6. Follow the standard tailscale procedure to approve your node
    That’s it!

BONUS: manage your tailscale with the Trayscale gui

  1. Go to Flathub and and install Trayscale
  2. Before running Trayscale, run the following command from a terminal (it only needs to be done once):
    sudo tailscale set --operator=$USER
  3. Open Trayscale. It should bring up a window GUI and also put an icon in the task tray.
  4. Optional: make Trayscale auto-start whenever you logon to your OpenMandriva system by adding it to System Settings–>Autostart

I hope this helps someone who may be struggling with tailscale like I was.

OK, back to replacing more of my systems with OpenMandriva. Cheers!

3 Likes
2

Sure!
Testers will test your how-to, tbh I don’t know what tailscale is but will test the install, so to confirm.
Then this guide can go to Resources for everyone in the future.
Thanks.

1 Like
3

Sorry, typo at step 3a.
The target directory should be /usr/sbin

4

Do you mean this?

https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/#fedora-39

Looks like they are aware of the issue upstream:

2 Likes
5

Yup, that looks similar to the error I’m getting.

6

Thanks, this solved a serious problem for me.

However, following the convention on my other systems, I put tailscale in /usr/bin and tailscaled in /sbin.

1 Like
7

Glad to hear it.

Yup, so long as the tailscaled binary is in /usr/sbin since the systemd service calls it from there:

[Service]
"ExecStart=/usr/sbin/tailscaled"

Hopefully a mod can edit my original instructions to correct my typo.

Happy tailnetting!

8

Yeah, I think /sbin and /usr/sbin are the same thing on most distros nowadays

1 Like
9

It works! Thank you.

1 Like
10

Welcome @RawBearToe! We are glad to see you and we hope you will decide to make this your home.

1 Like