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Setting up Tailscale on TrueNAS Core

Introduction

The goal of this guide is to work around the lack of a built-in Tailscale System Service in TrueNAS Core and enable

  • accessing your NAS services from your tailnet (tailnet-to-host direction),
  • accessing other tailnet machines from the NAS (host-to-tailnet direction).

It is assumed that you already have a Tailscale account and run a TrueNAS Core 13.0 server. Tailscale is going to be installed in a jail.

This solution relies on IPFW, FreeBSD's user interface for firewall & in-kernel NAT. Links to relevant documentation are available here: handbook section and man page.

⚠️ IPFW NAT does not work for me on TrueNAS Core 12.0-U8.1. It is probably buggy, see section below on IPFW issues. ⚠️

History

This guide is based upon the great How-To by AndrewShumate on installing Tailscale in a TrueNAS Core jail. At the end, he recommends to turn the Tailscale client in the jail into a subnet router via the --advertise-routes command-line option. This guide, however, takes a different approach by not activating the subnet router functionality Tailscale itself, but turns the jail itself into a router using IPFW.

Setting up a functioning IPFW-based solution has proven to be difficult, partially due to my own lack of experience and also due to the issues I have encountered. Also, relying on IPFW seems to be a controversial topic in the community according to this comment by sretalla. However, IPFW can provide access in both directions at the layer where this problem should probably be handled.

An alternative (partial) solution would be using a reverse proxy such as nginx, which could replace port forwarding in the tailnet-to-host direction. A crude implementation of this concept is also provided by the script setup-reverse-proxy.sh, based on the example by sretalla.

The solution contained in this repo is meant to be temporary until an official Tailscale System Service or Plugin is introduced. Please support the Jira ticket gathering interest for a Tailscale System Service in TrueNAS Core!

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to AndrewShumate, sretalla, and jgreco for their valuable comments and kind support!

Setup steps

Creating a dedicated jail for Tailscale

  1. Create a new Jail via Jails / Add / Advanced Jail Creation. Name it under Basic Properties / Name. By default, the name of the jail will also be its hostname (can be changed in the jail). Tailscale by default associates this hostname with the tailnet machine.

  2. For Release, currently, 13.1-RELEASE must be chosen. See section below on IPFW issues for more information.

  3. Check VNET. We will not use NAT here, so leave it unchecked (the jail will get an IP address on the same subnet as the host). In this guide, we will rely on our local DHCP server to assign an IP address to the jail, so ensure DHCP Autoconfigure IPV4 is checked. Ensure that the IP address of the jail is stable, by setting up a static DHCP lease. Alternatively, you can leave DHCP Autoconfigure IPV4 unchecked and simply assign a static IP address to the jail. The Berkeley Packet Filter is probably enabled automatically, ensure that it is checked. Note that IPv6 is not covered in this guide.

  4. Turn on Auto-start.

  5. (Optional) Uncheck Jail Properties / allow_set_hostname if the automatic setting of jail name as jail hostname is appropriate.

  6. Check Custom Properties / allow_tun.

  7. Save and wait for the jail to be created.

Setting up the jail

  1. In the drop-down section of the jail, start it and request a shell to the jail.

  2. Backup /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf and then replace inside the URL pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly to pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest, which can be achieved, e.g., as

    cp /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf.bak
sed -i '' 's/quarterly/latest/g' /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

  3. Clone this repository into the jail as

pkg install -y git
git clone https://github.com/KornelJahn/truenas-core-tailscale-jail.git
cd truenas-core-tailscale-jail

  1. On the Tailscale web admin interface, generate an auth key under Settings / Keys / Auth keys / Generate auth key.... Enable Pre-approved for a quicker process, click Generate key, and copy the auth key.

  2. In the jail shell, run the Tailscale setup script as

    ./setup-tailscale.sh <tailscale-auth-key>

    Ensure that your tailnet can be accessed by checking

    tailscale status

    inside the jail.

  3. Next, run the IPFW NAT setup script:

    ./setup-ipfw-nat.sh <host-ip-address> [<ports>]

    where the <ports> argument is optional. It can be used to configure forwarded ports, and takes the following format: 'proto1/port1 proto2/port2 ...'. For instance,

    ./setup-ipfw-nat.sh 192.168.1.2 'tcp/22 tcp/443'

    would set up forwading SSH and HTTPS connections, respectively, to 192.168.1.2. For the default port selection, see the helper script set-default-ports.sh.

  4. Restart the jail.

Configuring TrueNAS routing and DNS for the TrueNAS host

  1. The TrueNAS host needs to be configured to route tailnet IP addresses 100.64.0.0/10 through the jail as gateway. If the TrueNAS host has a static IP address, it is enough to add a static route under Network / Static Routes, with Destination 100.64.0.0/10, and Gateway set to the (stable) IP address of the jail. However, if the TrueNAS host uses DHCP to get its (statically leased) IP address, rather set the jail IP address as the default gateway under Network / Global Configuration / Default Gateway / IPv4 Default Gateway. As discussed in this forum thread, setting static routes is incompatible with DHCP, since -- as jgreco mentioned -- "when an IP interface is reconfigured, in many cases, IP routes via that interface are cleared by the kernel." Having configured routing, save the new settings.

  2. (Optional) If MagicDNS is used in Tailscale, you can configure your TrueNAS host to resolve tailnet FQDNs and hostnames. Relying on functioning routing to the jail, do so by adding the MagicDNS of the jail server at 100.100.100.100 under Network / Global Configuration / DNS Servers / Nameserver 1. The MagicDNS server will take care of non-tailnet DNS resolution by falling back either to the default DNS servers or to those set up in the Tailscale web admin interface. This setting will let you refer to tailnet machines as <hostname>.<tailnet-name>.ts.net (substitute appropriate values). To simply use machine hostnames, the search domain <tailnet-name>.ts.net needs to be added under Network / Global Configuration / Hostname and Domains / Additional Domains. Save the new settings.

  3. Test the new configuration (restart of the host system may be required beforehand, as noted by @larsyunker). In the TrueNAS host shell, try to ping another machine on your tailnet by IP address and by FQDN (if MagicDNS is used). From another machine on your tailnet, try to access the WebUI of TrueNAS via its tailnet IP address and its tailnet FQDN.

Setup scripts

Setup script setup-tailscale.sh installs Tailscale in the jail and activates it using the pre-defined auth key.

Script setup-ipfw-nat.sh perfoms the following tasks:

  • modifies /etc/rc.conf to enable the IPFW firewall & in-kernel NAT services with logging with a dedicated ipfw0 virtual interface for diagnostics;
  • extends /etc/sysctl.conf to disable TCP segmentation offload (required) and sets IPFW logging verbosity to 0 to enable inspecting traffic on ipfw0;
  • generates the /etc/ipfw.rules script that sets up IPFW; and
  • creates/extends /etc/rc.local to create a workaround for the bug that ipfw nat is not set up on jail start-up.

Alternative script setup-reverse-proxy.sh sets up an nginx reverse proxy to forward ports in the tailnet-to-host direction. It takes the same arguments as setup-ipfw-nat.sh.

Diagnostics

ipfw-related

The active IPFW rules can be checked using

ipfw list

and the NAT configuration using

ipfw nat show config

while NAT log counters can be inspected using

ipfw nat show log

For packet-level diagnostics, tcpdump on interface ipfw0 may be run in the jail, e.g. as

tcpdump -ptni ipfw0

For more information on IPFW logging, see the RULE FORMAT / log section of the man page.

General

Network interface parameters can be checked using ifconfig, the routing table using netstat -rn, and DNS resolution using host -v. Finally, the kernel message log is found at /var/log/messages.

IPFW issues

When trying to set up NAT through IPFW, I encountered the following issues, probably due to bugs in the implementation of IPFW NAT configuration.

To reproduce them, use the included script setup-ipfw-nat.sh to set up /etc/ipfw.rules and then run service ipfw restart.

The /sbin/ipfw nat 1 config command that fails should be correct in principle, as the IPFW man page contains an analogous redirect_port example.

Root causes for the errors below are probably found in the sbin/ipfw/nat.c file of previous versions of the FreeBSD source code but I haven't had time to track them down.

TrueNAS Core 12.0

Error message:

ipfw: unknown redir mode

Exact TrueNAS Core version was 12.0-U8.1 and FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE-p8. A likely related issue showed up in 2014.

TrueNAS Core 13.0

Error message:

ipfw: setsockopt(IP_FW_NAT44_XCONFIG): Invalid argument

Exact TrueNAS Core version was 13.0-U3 and FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE-p13. A likely related issue was reported in 2021.

Even using FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p3, there is an issue with IPFW NAT rules not being applied on jail start-up which has been worked around as mentioned above.