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Comment by 2bluesc | Hacker News Reader

The missing feature from Tailscale for me is the ability to host a Tailscale only DNS zone.

They have Magic DNS, but that only works for individual Tailscale nodes. I want multiple DNA records pointing to a single Tailscale node. Would be even better if I could use my own domain (subdomain even better) instead of their long `foo-bar.ts.net` domain.

Currently need to do this manually, but seems overly redundant since Tailscale already does 90% of this with MagicDNS and is fast because it's in their client vs a remote server.

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Step 1: install Tailscale and Docker on a VM or whatever

Step 2: set up a Technitium container in host networking mode

Step 3: configure Technitium with a stub zone pointing your ts.net name at 100.100.100.100

Step 4: set up a zone for whatever.tld

Step 5: set up a DNAME record for ts.whatever.tld pointing at your ts.net domain

Result: querying this new DNS server with machine.ts.whatever.tld resolves to machine.blah-foo.ts.net resolves to that machine's 100.64.0.0 address.

https://technitium.com/dns/

I know this can be done manually (and I do), but the issue with that is that: 1. It's manual 2. Single point of failure of this server that was needed

My point was that MagicDNS is implemented in the Tailscale client on each machine (fault tolerant, 0ms latency) and has almost all the things necessary (DNS resolver, push mechanism for record updates) except for a custom defined zone.

Running `drill @100.100.100.100 <node_name>.<magic_dns_domain>.ts.net` is 0ms because it's local, and doesn't depend on a single DNS server running somewhere on my Tailscale network.

Yep, that's fair. I actually run this setup on every machine in my lab. Technitium is so light weight and with this setup I don't need to jump through any hoops to get Docker containers to resolve Tailscale names.

I'd never heard of Technitium, but was intrigued looking at. Was thinking "hmmm what could I do with this" and then had to refrain from creating another project just because.

TBH I find Docker networking a struggle and usually disable the `iptables` stuff and end up configuring my own rules. Painful, but at least less intrusive.

On the note of Tailscale+Docker networking, gluetun[0] is pretty awesome. It runs a Wireguard (not tailscale compatible, yet) instance within a Docker container and then you share that networking namespace with the other containers effectively confining them to the VPN. Comes with basic container namespace firewall configuration and DNS over TLS configuration.

[0] https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun

There is an open GitHub issue for this and it’s already been implemented in the Tailscale client, it’s really nice too as the DNS records are pushed out to the local DNS resolver on each Tailscale client, rather than being lookups to a separate server, so it’s super fast.

Unfortunately there aren’t any options for it on the Tailscale control panel, but if you use Headscale you can configure it and take advantage of it now.

I searched and couldn't find anything in the tailscale client repo. Link to the issue?

Did find headscale docs about "Setting custom DNS records"[0]. It seems only `A` and `AAAA` records are supported. This might be the start of setting up headscale this weekend.

[0] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/main/docs/dns-rec...

Tailscale issue

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1543

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