Tailscale

How Tailscale Works

Downloads

For MacOS, there is an AppStore variant which you can install as an alternative.

Tailscale Status

You can check Tailscale status from command line.

Windows:

C:\Users\Userbob>tailscale status
100.86.138.253   desktop-userbob      useremail@ windows -
100.88.252.98    userbob-macbook-pro  useremail@ macOS   idle, tx 820 rx 1692

MacOS:

$ tailscale status
100.88.252.98    userbob-macbook-pro  useremail@ macOS   -
100.86.138.253   desktop-userbob      useremail@ windows idle, tx 1692 rx 820

# Health check:
#     - no gateway index found

Adding Devices to Network

https://tailscale.com/kb/1316/device-add

Ping other Devices

Once you've added two devices to your Tailscale network, you should be able to do a ping between them.

For instance, I can ping between my Windows computer to my MacOS computer (but I can't do the other way around. Need to check my firewall settings on windows)

Note: If your computer is on another VPN, you will not be able to ping the device. See here: https://tailscale.com/kb/1105/other-vpns?q=ping . In most cases, you can't use Tailscale alongside other VPNs. In practice, most VPNs set aggressive firewall rules to ensure all network traffic goes through them. They then drop all Tailscale traffic, which only Tailscale knows how to route. VPNs that don't use aggressive firewall rules may be able to run alongside Tailscale.

Tailscale CLI

On Windows, you can ping devices on connected to your tailnet using the tailscale cli.

C:\Users\ardik>tailscale ping 100.88.252.98

On MacOS, you can also ping using the tailscale cli. On my system, I installed the AppStore variant, so I needed to make this alias:

$ alias tailscale="/Applications/Tailscale.localized/Tailscale.app/Contents/MacOS/Tailscale"

$ tailscale ping 100.86.138.253
pong from desktop-toreeks (100.86.138.253) via 154.47.22.45:41641 in 48ms