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Installing Tailscale

Remote access joins your own Tailscale tailnet. The hub becomes an ordinary machine on it, and you open its dashboard from any of your other devices.

Before you start

Make sure that you have:

Hub

Hub runs Tailscale on the appliance itself, below Home Assistant. Remote access therefore survives a fault in the container stack.

  1. Open the Hub dashboard on your home network.
  2. Select the remote access card.
  3. Select the login link. It opens Tailscale in a browser.
  4. Sign in to your own Tailscale account.
  5. Approve the device.

The dashboard reports the tailnet address when the hub joins.

Hub Mini

Hub Mini carries its own Tailscale client. It needs an auth key, because the device has no browser for a login page.

  1. Open the Tailscale admin console in a browser.
  2. Generate an auth key.
  3. Copy the key.
  4. Open the hub web interface on your home network.
  5. Go to Settings, then Setup.
  6. Turn on Remote Access.
  7. Paste the key into the Auth key field.
  8. Save.

The hub stores the key and never shows it again. Its screen shows the tailnet address when it joins.

Confirm the connection

  1. Open the Tailscale admin console.
  2. Find the hub in the machine list.
  3. Copy its tailnet address, which starts with 100..
  4. Open http://100.x.y.z/ from another device on your tailnet.

The dashboard opens. No port is forwarded, and nothing is published to the public internet.

Troubleshooting

The hub does not appear in the machine list

Make sure that the hub has internet access. Then check the key. An auth key expires, and a hub that was given an expired key never joins.

The tailnet address does not answer

Make sure that the device you are testing from is signed in to the same tailnet. A device that is signed out reaches nothing.

The key was refused

Generate a new key and paste it again. Do not reuse a key that is marked as used, if it was not created as a reusable key.