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I've set up tailscale and connected to an exit node on my VPS on vultr.com. Predictably, I was kicked out and couldn't reconnect, as the VPS's public IP address has changed.

I can reboot the VPS and try again. What steps will I need to take? Does my VPS running behind an exit node even have a unique public address (which?), or does it need to be set up for something like port forwarding?

From looking at tailscale documentation, it looks like they came up with their own ssh, why? Why is the standard ssh inadequate for the purpose? I am not the admin of my tailscale network, and the admin is swamped right now. What can I do?

Irina Rapoport
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2 Answers2

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SSH uses TCP as transport and therefore requires the (srcaddr, srcport, dstaddr, dstport) tuple to be constant over the connection's lifetime.

I believe that since tailscale rotates connections dynamically, it is more suitable for use by clients than servers in a traditional client-server model, unless it provides an 'internal' virtual network over the distributed transport (which would kind of defeat the purpose of covering your tracks). If you want to connect to your VPS over tailscale, you need to use their tools probably because of that. You can still connect directly to your VPS, though, through plain Internet, if it has any address of its own, and is not firewalled away (or similarly, NATed away). Your provider should either show you the address, or even better, provide access to out-of-band (like serial-port) command line access, where you can query the current addresses using commands like ip addr show.

Arusekk
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In your Tailscale Admin console you should be able to see the machine's IP. Just use normal ssh and login that way.

So instead of ssh user@8.8.8.8 you'd do ssh user@100.64.0.1. Tailscale's own ssh client is useful if you want to hook deeper into their MagicDNS stuff, but it's not meant to be the only way to ssh into your machine.

If you run into errors, ping the machine you want to connect to (tailscale ping vps-machine-name). That should help you debug any tailscale client connection problems.

patrick
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