Tailscale on OpenWRT

1. Extract the contents of root to your filesystem root:

tar x -zvC / -f openwrt-tailscale-enabler-<tag>.tgz

2. Install the prerequisites for wget and tailscale:

opkg update
opkg install libustream-openssl ca-bundle kmod-tun

3. Run tailscale for the first time:

/etc/init.d/tailscale start
tailscale up --accept-dns=false --advertise-routes=10.0.0.0/24

Both of these commands download the tailscale package to get the binaries to /tmp. The /etc/init.d/tailscale will start the tailscale daemon. The next command uses the tailscale CLI to configure the login and add some settings to prevent dns changes and advertise routes. Use the URL printed to login to tailscale.

4. Enable tailscale at boot:

/etc/init.d/tailscale enable

Verify by looking for an entry here:

ls /etc/rc.d/S*tailscale*

This confirms that there is a symlink to start the tailscale service.

At this point, you should have:

• tailscale stubs in /usr/bin: ls /urs/bin/tailscale*
  • tailscale xxxx bytes
  • tailscaled xxxx bytes
• tailscale service init script in /etc/init.d/tailscale: ls /etc/init.d/tailscale
• symlink /etc/rc.d/S*tailscale: ls /etc/rc.d/S*tailscale*

If so, go ahead and...

5. Reboot the router and verify that it shows up online on the Tailscale Admin portal.

If you log back into your router, the first time you run a command like tailscale status the stub will download the tailscale binary. The tailscaled daemon should have already been downloaded by the service start.

6. To update the version of tailscale, grab the latest version here of the form 1.2.10_mips and replace the same in /usr/bin/tailscale and /usr/bin/tailscaled: version="1.2.10_mips".

Note: You need to have atleast 11+16 = ~27 MB of free space in /tmp (which is usually in RAM) to be able to use this.