Tailscale devices with a custom domain
November 1, 2023 by Will Norris
One of the things that kinda blew my mind my first week at Tailscale was MagicDNS. I had been using Tailscale at home for a while, but just hadn’t actually used MagicDNS at that point. It runs a local DNS server in every Tailscale client that can answer queries about other devices in your network. Every tailnet is given a name of the form tailnetNNNN.ts.net, and so every device can be addressed as <device>.tailnetNNNN.ts.net. If you want, you can instead choose a fun tailnet name which is randomly picked from a list of things with tails, and a list of things with scales. So you might end up with something like <device>.orca-lizard.ts.net.
While the fun tailnet names are cute and all, I really wanted to use my own domain. For quite a while, I just manually maintained DNS records for the handful of hosts I cared about. Tailscale IP addresses don’t change, so this wasn’t actually too much work. But I recently got around to switching to a new tailnet using my own domain with custom OIDC, which meant I needed to reregister all of my devices.
