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

[Kevin Bloom <ktnb%netbsd.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:
>

My apologies for not getting the NetBSD support for wip/tailscale
better. That's partly why I keep it in wip and not merged in -current.
I use tailscale for work but I only use macOS and Linux (both with
pkgsrc) so I mostly keep it up-to-date for those systems.

I do, however, make sure that it at least always compiles on NetBSD!

> 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
>

I can't guarantee I'll get very far but I can give it a shot. I'll
be taking a holiday next week so it may be a little bit until I can
devote a large chunk of time to it.

> 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?
> >

There is a bunch of OS specific stuff that is compiled out for
NetBSD so that might be what is causing it to not work. In the case
of most of the stuff in tailscale, matching what is done with OpenBSD
tends to get you close to a solution.

> > 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
>

Thanks,

kev