Running Tailscale on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-15 07:00:09

As I’ve written in previous posts, I really like WireGuard as a means to securely connect networks. Recently I’ve been using Tailscale a lot more. Tailscale makes WireGuard even easier than it already is and provides additional security: key rotation and single sign-on.

While I’ve been using it on each of my systems - Linux, macOS, and iOS, I wanted to shift the endpoint to the edge of my network to make connectivity a little bit easier.

At present, you can’t have simultaneous Tailscale logins, and I’m finding that I need to access a corporate network with Tailscale as well as my home playthings, so until simultaneous account logins are supported, this is my workaround.

My edge router at home is, aptly, a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4. Under the hood of the EdgeRouter is a MIPS CPU running a Linux-based operating system forked from VyattaOS. You can SSH in and turn all sorts of knobs not exposed via the web UI. Since Tailscale offers MIPS binaries (as well as ARM!) I can treat the router just like any Linux system and connect it to Tailscale.

These instructions are very similar to what you’d do to run Tailscale on an EC2 instance or other cloud-based system acting as a gateway.