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Comment by snoopy_telex | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently running Tailscale at home, but will switch to Headscale once they get iOS support sorted out.

It's magical. It's well on the way towards being a critical piece of infrastructure in my mind.

I felt the same way until Tailscale mysteriously stopped working one day for iOS.

There’s no way to troubleshoot. A bunch of forum posters reported the same issue after an update, but no solution for a few months.

(Tailscale engineer here)

What's the bug? I hadn't heard about this.

Metrics show no drop in iOS control plane connections.

Here’s the post i put up on the forum.

https://forum.tailscale.com/t/difficulty-with-ios-tailscale-...

Other posts had some troubleshooting guidance that wasnt effective. Note that it only failed on iOS. Still using it on my Debian boxes.

If you could point me at anything I would be very grateful. I’m using some other VPN container now that i don’t like!

I had a similar issue, clearing history and website data in Settings > Safari and reinstalling fixed it for me. I may have rebooted the iPhone as well for good measure.

I've been using tailscale for a couple years. wrt ios every couple of weeks all traffic on my phone stops and I need to open the tailscale app and toggle the active switch for traffic to start flowing again. I don't have that problem with my other devices.

I've actually had that happen on Android, seemed to somehow kill even all non-tailscale traffic too

The way it works on phones is these apps operate as full VPN due to how network permissions for apps are handled. When you turn on tailscale, tailscale will pass through traffic it doesn’t need to touch. that’s also why you can’t have two vpn apps running at the same time.

Same here for Windows, I believe I got this one https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5531

As in tailscale stopped working or headscale?

Same. I recently started using it for a personal project, and was amazed how much it simplifies the access and management of the infrastructure.

I'm also using it to SSH into my home PC. No need to open router ports, configure dynamic IP, or whatever. Just setup tailscale, and I can simply do ssh user@homepc thanks to MagicDNS.

is there any chance they will be able to fix it? as far as I know the iOS client does not support setting a custom control server.

So far doesn't look like it unless you go the MDM route, which I guess is aimed mainly at enterprise users.

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5431

Wow, that's a pretty bullshit sounding response from tailscale. "We don't want to overcrowd the settings". It's ok to say "we'd prefer our users used our paid auth, rather than self host auth and use the fruits of our labour for the app". No need to be so opaque about it.

You can add profiles with Apple configurator 2. You don't have to go the full MDM route. It's quite easy.

I think the problem is though that the iOS client doesn't support configuring this option in the profile (whether installed via configurator or MDM) either.

That’s correct. The open issue is here: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1572

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