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Installing Tailscale

Tailscale is how Hub reaches you from outside your network. The hub becomes an ordinary machine on your own tailnet, and you open its dashboard from any of your other devices.

Hub Mini and Hub LTE do not use Tailscale. They carry their own tunnel, and the app pairs it. Go to Hub Mini and Hub LTE below.

Before you start

To put Hub on a tailnet, 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.

The hub ships with no tailnet credential, so the first step is a login that only you can complete.

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

The notification closes when the hub joins its tailnet.

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.

Hub Mini and Hub LTE

These hubs hold no Tailscale client. You pair a phone with the hub on your home network, and that phone then opens a private tunnel to the hub from anywhere. There is no auth key to paste and no account to create.

  1. Open the Wala Works app on your home network.
  2. Select the hub.
  3. Select Set up Remote Access.

The first phone paired with a new hub is the owner's, and it connects immediately. Every phone after it waits for the owner to approve it on the hub, and that approval asks for the code the hub shows.

Troubleshooting

The hub does not appear in the machine list

Make sure that the hub has internet access. Then make sure that somebody completed the login link and approved the device in the admin console. A hub whose link was never opened keeps waiting.

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 app says a hub is waiting for approval

The pairing is good. Somebody must approve that phone on the hub itself, with the code the hub shows.