Tailscale on OpenWRT with smaller, combined and compressed binaries! 🚀

Usage:

0. Download the latest release from the releases page. Wget works well.

1. Extract the contents of root to your filesystem root:

tar x -zvC / -f openwrt-tailscale-enabler-<tag>.tgz

2. Install the prerequisites for wget and tailscale:

opkg update
opkg install libustream-openssl ca-bundle kmod-tun

3. Run tailscale for the first time:

/etc/init.d/tailscale start
tailscale up --accept-dns=false --advertise-routes=10.0.0.0/24

Both of these commands download the tailscale package to get the binaries to /tmp. The /etc/init.d/tailscale will start the tailscale daemon. The next command uses the tailscale CLI to configure the login and add some settings to prevent dns changes and advertise routes. Use the URL printed to login to tailscale.

4. Enable tailscale at boot:

/etc/init.d/tailscale enable

Verify by looking for an entry here:

ls /etc/rc.d/S*tailscale*

5. Reboot the router and verify that it shows up online on the Tailscale Admin portal.

6. To update the version of tailscale, grab the latest version here of the form 1.2.10_mips and replace the same in /usr/bin/tailscale and /usr/bin/tailscaled: version="1.2.10_mips". Now we have a script that will automatically get the latest tailscale version. Just reboot and lost the /tmp/tailscale. So when the script runs, it will download the latest version.

Note: You need to have atleast 11+16 = ~ 27 MB of free space in /tmp (which is usually in RAM) to be able to use this.

Updated: This repo had used the smaller tailscale version which is around 5MB - 6MB with upx and no need for 2 seperate binaries. So the space required is less than 10MB! Cheers!