Category: linux

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tailscale account switching (further fumblings)

So, I’ve been using headscale for the last few months, combined with a cheap low spec VM from MythicBeasts.com (as my VPN “server” or at least exit node).

Recently, we decided to ditch using bastion ssh (jump) hosts at work, and move to use a VPN instead. This saves us from having a VM running ssh from listening for inbound connections.

Then I wondered how I could access both the work and my home tailscale networks from my laptop etc.

Initially I came across a blog/article discussing how to access two tailscale networks at once, which involved using linux network namespaces and adding various iptables rules etc. I sort of had a go, but it didn’t seem to want to work and it felt like it was going cause me trouble.

So I thought I’d probably have to keep switching tailscale networks somehow (e.g. tailscale down ; tailscale up ….–server … etc ). But this means I need to keep approving the it on the headscale side etc.

Then I saw there’s a ‘tailscale switch’ command ….

# tailscale switch --list
ID Tailnet Account
0101 my.headscale.server david*
1010 some-label david.goodwin@work.corp

and switching is just a “tailscale switch some-label” or “tailscale switch my.headscale.server”

That’s a bit easier than having to reauthenticate with the appropriate tailscale network etc.

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A little over ten years ago ….

A little over 10 years ago, in a previous role/company, I designed and implemented a website hosting environment (with a catchy name of “w 3 p cloud”) to ….

  • support WordPress/LAMP like environments
  • have some sort of process/file isolation between sites, so a malware infection in one shouldn’t be able to spread/reach other sites
  • have resource limits in place (the business also liked the idea of charging for more “firepower”, I just wanted to try and stop one site from doing a denial of service on others)
  • be hosted in AWS (EC2) because it was cool to be moving to the cloud (despite the cost)

Eventually, I settled on using LXC containers with a Varnish server as a HTTP frontend router. Hosting within AWS (EC2) was basically a non-negotiable requirement and there weren’t many alternatives either.

A crude web UI was added for managing sites, which was quickly adapted to have a JSON API on top. Then background tasks were added – involving a job queue (originally gearman, later on beanstalk) and some management of iptables rules.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s still (just about) in use.

As a programmer/developer, we often don’t think too much about the distant future when creating something. We’ve got immediate deadlines, and thinking more than 2-3 years is difficult. There are plenty of uncertainties in life afterall!

Over the years, there have been multiple upgrades of various bits (Varnish, PHP, Debian release, Linux kernels etc).

I think it had between 5-8k sites at it’s peak, and I often found it amusing when I realised I was ordering/using a website hosted on it as a member of the public.

Anyway, all good things come to an end, I guess …. and finally a migration to something bigger/better/faster/shinier has begun, as this count of sites being hosted in it shows:

graph of number of sites being hosted over time, showing a recent decline

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Trying out headscale (tailscale vpn stuff)

For sometime, I’ve been using Wireguard for a VPN to use when I’m out and about etc.

As I’m fairly stupid, I used wg-quick to generate the config – however when the config looks a bit like this –


[Peer]
PublicKey = cm+t2u0giNynMkcX1+afPu6SlKyLMeTe8iWKhT1FsDk=
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.13/32
Endpoint = 192.168.122.13:51820
....

I began to find management became a problem – i.e which computer is that exactly ?

wg show does give you something a bit like this –


...
peer: cm+t2u0giNynMkcX1+afPu6SlKyLMeTe8iWKhT1FsDk=
endpoint: 192.168.122.13:51820
allowed ips: 10.0.0.13/32
...

which is sort of useful, but it still doesn’t tell me a human name. I’ve tried leaving comments in the config before, but they just get wiped out.

I’ve often thought about using TailScale, but wasn’t overly happy with the idea of some third party being involved. Eventually I came across headscale – which offers a self-hosted option for the backend (so your devices use the tailscale frontend).

After a bit of poking around over the weekend I now have this: headscale nodes list

which is a bit nicer –

I’m still pretty new to using Tailscale for a VPN, but I did at least eventually get my phone to join the network, and everything seems to work.

It’s sort of interesting that tailscale doesn’t add an entry into your routing table – but instead adds a few iptables rules in (nat) to mess around with things.

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New Computer Time? Perhaps not quite yet

Well, I almost went ahead and bought a Beelink SER8 – after my current desktop (Beelink SER6 Max) kept crashing at random intervals (normally between 3 and 6 days apart).

Of course, since I threatened to replace the SER6 with something else, it’s behaved itself…. typical hardware

ALMOST as annoying as a printer.

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atuin – console shell history search

As a random, useful, console tool … try atuin for some magical shell history searching.

I’m too lazy to try and record a semi-useful demo of it, but it’s replaced my ‘ctrl+r’ lookup thingy and has a good search interface.

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Upgrade some things

Well, I sort of realised I had a web server or two that were still on Debian Buster, and it was time to move to Bullseye or Bookworm. As usual the Debian upgrade procedure was mostly pretty straight forward and uneventful.

Interesting findings :

  • “hitch“, which I use as an SSL frontend to varnish, doesn’t seem to get along all that well with systemd and silently fails if your config has “daemon = on” setting in /etc/hitch/hitch.conf. Annoyingly when trying to test the configuration with “hitch -t” you will get an error like: “No x509 certificate PEM file specified for frontend ‘default’!” – the solution to that is to specify the config file – i.e : hitch -t --config /etc/hitch/hitch.conf

  • hitch hasn’t had a release in it’s packagecloud.io repository for the last 3 years; so the debian supported variant looks more appealing.

In other news, I noticed this post where someone moaned about systemd-resolved the other day – https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18kh1r5/im_shocked_that_almost_no_one_is_talking_about/ – I’ve had similar problems to the people on the thread (resolved stops working etc) so thought it was time to try and use ‘unbound‘ instead.

apt-get install unbound

and then tell /etc/resolv.conf to use 127.0.0.1 for DNS.

annoyingly, unbound-control stats isn’t quite as pretty as resolvectl statistics but oh well.

echo -e “nameserver 127.0.0.1\nnameserver 8.8.8.8\noptions timeout:4” >/etc/resolv.conf

and an /etc/unbound/unbound.conf file that looks perhaps like :

server:
interface: 127.0.0.1
access-control: 127.0.0.0/8 allow
access-control: ::1/128 allow
# The following line will configure unbound to perform cryptographic
# DNSSEC validation using the root trust anchor.
auto-trust-anchor-file: "/var/lib/unbound/root.key"
tls-cert-bundle: "/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt"

remote-control:
control-enable: yes
# by default the control interface is is 127.0.0.1 and ::1 and port 8953
# it is possible to use a unix socket too
control-interface: /run/unbound.ctl

forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-tls-upstream: yes
forward-addr: 1.1.1.1@853#cloudflare-dns.com
forward-addr: 1.0.0.1@853#cloudflare-dns.com

(Unfortunately my ISP is shitty, and doesn’t yet give me an ipv6 address).

Looking at https://1.1.1.1/help – I do sometimes see that ‘DNS over TLS’ is “yes”…. so I guess something is right; annoyingly I don’t see anything useful from unbound’s stats (unbound-control stats) to show it’s done a secure query…

“unbound-host” (another debian package) – will helpfully tell you whether a lookup was done ‘securely’ or not – e.g.

$ unbound-host google.com -D -v
google.com has address 142.250.178.14 (insecure)
google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4009:815::200e (insecure)
google.com mail is handled by 10 smtp.google.com. (insecure)

which seems a little odd to me (I’d have thought google would support dns sec), but some domains do work – e.g.

$ unbound-host mythic-beasts.com -D -v
mythic-beasts.com has address 93.93.130.166 (secure)
mythic-beasts.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1098:0:82:1000:0:1:2 (secure)
mythic-beasts.com mail is handled by 10 mx1.mythic-beasts.com. (secure)
mythic-beasts.com mail is handled by 10 mx2.mythic-beasts.com. (secure)

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bash – escaping variables for use within commands

Escaping quotes within variables is always painful in bash (somehow) – e.g.

foo”bar

and it’s not obvious that you’d need to write e.g.

“foo”\””bar”

(at least to me).

Thankfully a bash built in magical thing can be used to do the escaping for you.

In my case, I need to pass a ‘PASSWORD’ variable through to run within a container. The PASSWORD variable needs escaping so it can safely contain things like ; or quote marks (” or ‘).

e.g. docker compose run app /bin/bash "echo $PASSWORD > /some/file"

or e.g. ssh user@server “echo $PASSWORD > /tmp/something”

The fix is to use the ${PASSWORD@Q} variable syntax – for example:

#!/bin/bash

FOO=”bar’\”baz”

ssh user@server “echo $FOO > /tmp/something”

This will fail, with something like : “bash: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''“

As she shell at the remote end it seeing echo bar'"baz and expects the quote mark to be closed.

So using the @Q magic –

ssh user@server “echo ${FOO@Q} > /tmp/something”

which will result in /tmp/something containing “bar'”baz” which is correct.

See also https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Shell-Parameter-Expansion.html#Shell-Parameter-Expansion

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asus pn50 and cpufreq/boost

I’ve been using an ASUS PN50 (that’s a mini pc, with an AMD Ryzen 4800u processor – so sort of a laptop without a screen) as my desktop for ages.

Increasingly I’ve found it sluggish and I was contemplating replacing it with something newer, and then I discovered why the CPU speed in /proc/cpuinfo was always 1400mhz….

I needed to :

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

Once that’s done, the CPU cores can go up to about 4.2Ghz … #doh

In other news – https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Per-Policy-CPUFreq-Boost looks interesting.

Unfortunately now my minipc’s fan is always speeding up / slowing down when it used to be pretty quiet :-/

Thanks to https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/16cuzd8/asus_pn50_unlock_cpu_speed_under_linux/