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Comment by mrbonner | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody encounter issues with DNS after installing tailscale with it's MagicDNS enabled? It drives me nuts because my entire network just stops working. I removed tailscale but still won't be able to connect to my Ubuntu server.

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I have this happen largely with Apple OS devices. Apple's DNS service can be notoriously persnickity (I've had issues with it outside of Tailscale as well), and I usually need to bounce interfaces or flush DNS cache (where I can on macOS) to resolve issues. WRT Tailscale, I also have issues with it on my phone. I currently have my phone configured to connect to my Tailnet when I leave networks I don't control so that I can maintain access to my personal cloud on the go, however after a few connections and disconnections, I have to bounce several interfaces in order to correct both DNS and routing.

Yes! I also experience this. I also had some weird interaction with another wireguard-based VPN and Tailscale, where it crashed my DNS so hard I had to reset my entire laptop.

I've had issues with tailscale dns for a while where I'll wake my mac up and the dns will just not work until I disable tailscale. I can then re-enable it and everything continues to work.

I logged a bug about it and the latest versions this seems to have gone away. I also moved away from the mac store variant and into the standalone. Not sure if that helped either.

Yeah, you need to be conscious about your tailscale domain, your .home (or whatever your router or dhcp server advertises) and your .local hostnames. Even if you’re aware, things are sometimes wonky, IME primarily on macOS.

Sometimes I have issues like this. It's related to my ISP not supporting IPv6. I don't have time to explain this in detail, but at least that's one angle of it that you might want to explore further.

Same. When my cell has an ip6 ip, I can’t get dns to resolve on my systems at home. I can still access everything by ip4 ip though. I haven’t had time to find a solution yet. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s nginx, pi-hole, router, or Tailscale config related… probably a combination.

I encountered a similar issue when I first started using Tailscale. My fix is simple: disable IPv4 inside Tailscale. Just use the v6 ULA address that begins with fd7a exclusively. This works even if your ISP doesn't support IPv6: the inner IPv6 packets can be encapsulated inside v4 packets. There's unfortunately no GUI to do this; you'll have to change the Tailscale ACL to disable IPv4.

> disable IPv4 inside Tailscale.

TIL this is a thing

> Just use the v6 ULA address that begins with fd7a exclusively.

perfect, this is exactly what I desired

(I'm having an increasingly high number of sad v4 only LAN devices and planned to move to a v4 block that sits way too close to the one Tailscale uses.)

> There's unfortunately no GUI to do this; you'll have to change the Tailscale ACL to disable IPv4.

ah that's why I missed it, thanks!

I don't know how it works on Linux, but for Windows, the 'MagicDNS' just automatically adds a bunch of static entries to your hosts file to resolve the TS FQDNs and simple/machine names.

I am on Arch and often end up with DNS broken in a way that requires me to restart tailscaled.

Yeah, I honestly couldn't get Tailscale to work reliably at all. DNS, routing, firewalls etc. My overall impression was it will work if either you go for it on your entire local subnet, or you have a very simple local network topology. Having local nodes inexplicably talking to each other via a cloud relay basically all the time just isn't acceptable. (And webrtc could always find the local candidates when doing ICE, so it's not that).

It's interesting because they have clearly demonstrated a demand for such a thing, but the "just works" pitch is a fantasy, at least today.

The subnet routing feature can cause network issues

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