Re: Progress on tailscale on NetBSD (plus $ available)

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

Following up on my previous message

Using pkgsrc/wip/tailscale (many thanks to ktnb for maintaining that!)
I seem to be able to get a pretty reliable full (not needing the -tun
userspace-networking workaround) tailscale client on NetBSD-11_RC3 by:

Initial tailscale connect (needed once)
- "/etc/rc.d/tailscaled onestart" (Using the default "-tun
userspace-networking")
- "tailscale up" (and configure as normal)
- Note the assigned ip - "tailscale ip", or login to tailscale.com, or
check from another machine on the tailnet) - eg 100.125.57.19
- "/etc/rc.d/tailscaled onestop"
- Replace the tailscaled_start() section of  /etc/rc.d/tailscaled with
the below (where the IP is the same as noted above)
        ifconfig tun0 create 100.125.57.19 > /dev/null 2>&1
        ${command} > /var/log/tailscaled.log 2>&1 &

From that point tailscaled can be started as normal.

As mentioned, I'd be very happy to contribute $200 of beverage monies
to anyone who was able to resolve this final "needing to manually
assign IP" issue :-p

Thanks

David

On Thu, 5 Mar 2026 at 16:45, David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> I have some potential progress on tailscale working on NetBSD
>
> I created a Freelancer.com project for "Fix Tailscale tun networking
> on NetBSD" with a small amount of $ for "have a look and document what
> you tried" and somewhat more for "get it working". While @vudinhgiang
> did not get it fully working, they found enough of interest that they
> were paid the full amount :)
>
> Anyway, back to the progress.
>
> This is based on the wip/tailscale package, which is v1.94.2
>
> The status quo is: rc.d/tailscaled has "-tun userspace-networking",
> which has tailscale working with (unsurprisingly) userspace
> networking, changing it to "-tun tun0" will cause tailscale to try to
> start tun networking and fail.
>
> @vudinhgiang discovered that if you manually set the IP address on
> tun0, the tailscale network comes up. As a proof of concept he hacked
> in some code inside tailscale to shell out to ifconfig to set the IP,
> but it also works if you manually set the IP before {re,}starting
> tailscaled
>
> I don't know what is special about tailscale and NetBSD, as tailscale
> runs fine on other BSDs and wireguard runs fine on NetBSD, but maybe
> someone with more tun knowledge has an idea?
>
> Once the tun networking has started we still cannot contact other
> systems as the NetBSD end appears to use its main IP address, not the
> IP of the tun interface
>
> So - at least we now have two clearly defined issues with tailscale on NetBSD
>
> Based on that, if anyone is interested in taking another tilt I'm
> happy to re-offer the $200 for a working NetBSD tailscale pkgsrc
> package using tun networking :)
>
> Thanks
>
> David