Noob Tailscale questions

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I'm having a hard time with tail scale, I have it setup on my windows computer and on my android phone.

I want to be able to connect to the hotspot on my phone and access local resources on my computer. I have tried googling it and I just get a 1000 conflicting statements none of which are of any help.

So far it works fine from my phone to my PC with no issues but when I connect a device to the phone it can't see anything on the local network through that device. The connected device in question is a steamdeck and yes I attempted to install tail scale on the deck which also failed miserably.

I followed this video and at sudo bash tailscale.sh I get no such file or directory but I can see the files in file manager. If I attempt to run it from the folder I get could not find /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale.sh.

I tried this official guide https://github.com/tailscale-dev/deck-tailscale and it fails at step 2 saying there is no such directory but I can navigate directly too it and see the files are there.

I'm so lost, can anyone point me in a direction? the ultimate goal here is to use jellyfin out side of my network on my steam deck and every install guide out there fails. I don't see it in the discovery store and the official git hub desktop app cannot even see the files it just downloaded.

I'm new to linux, I'm lost, and I have no idea whats going on.

[email protected]

Your phone’s hotspot likely doesn’t create a local network. The other problem is that Tailscale works by creating a secure tunnel between your client and your PC. Local devices won’t have access to this secure tunnel. You need to setup Tailscale directly on the client device you want to connect to your PC from for it to work.

[email protected]

The problem is that your phone's hotspot network doesn't advertise routes through the Tailscale tunnel, and the deck doesn't know where it's supposed to send the traffic. I don't know how/if it can be done.

Try this guide on the deck: https://github.com/tailscale-dev/deck-tailscale

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Again I have tried to set it up directly, it fails every time. Tail scale has subnet routing for this very purpose, I just can't figure out what I am doing wrong on either one.

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That does not work, thats why I came here to ask. It fails at step 2.

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Tailscale client definitely needs to be installed and logged in on the destination device (Steam Deck in this case). Is it possible that you are typing "Sudo" instead of "sudo" in the command after opening Konsole? Linux commands are case-sensitive.

I'm not knowledgeable about the steam deck, but it is also possible that sudo is not installed by default, in which case you will have to install it. sudo is a command that allows you to run other commands as root (basically admin).

I found this article that might help: https://pimylifeup.com/steam-deck-sudo-password/

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You have to setup a sudo password originally to install things in desktop mode but that has been done, sudo is not the issue. literally copy and pasted from this article https://github.com/tailscale-dev/deck-tailscale. It fails on step 2 claiming the directory does not exist.

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Program no worky will not be enough if you want help. What is the exact output when you try to run tailscale.sh?

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I literaly gave the output in my message "no such file or directory"

step one clone repo

step two Run sudo bash tailscale.sh to install Tailscale

result no such file or directory

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Actually, watching the video it looks like they first enter:

cd Documents/deck-tailscale/

then enter:

sudo bash tailscale.sh

If you don't have the directory Documents/deck-tailscale/, then you will have to go back a step and find out where GitHub Desktop is storing the local files.

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I ran it from the local folder, literaly clicked on tailscale.sh and clicked run in konsole.
still says it doesn't exist when I'm fucking looking at it.

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use ls command, as in the video, to list the contents of a directory, then use cd to change directory based on what you see. You can use cd .. to navigate to the parent directory of your current location if needed.

Also make note of the Local path shown when cloning the repository in the previous step to help find it. When you see "tailscale.sh" as one of the items after typing ls, then you will know you are in the right place.

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Running it from a file explorer may not work due to permissions.

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You should see "Getting version..." right after running the script. Did you cd into the directory where the repository was cloned?

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Subnet routing is generally far more complex than simply installing the client. If you aren't succeeding at one you're likely not going to succeed at the other.

I don't know the exact problem based on what you've described and I'm not going to promise I can solve it for you but I'm going to try to give you some tools you can use to help yourself a little and hopefully be able to better understand what is going wrong and that will help you understand what you can do about it. Don't get frustrated by this issue, this is a learning experience and this is a skill you need to invest in and develop so that you're not just blindly copy-pasting instructions from videos (which is a bad place to be)

Step 1: Figure out where your tailscale.sh actually is.

Once inconsistency I noticed in your description of what's going on is that you're attempting to run tailscale.sh but you're describing a path of /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale.sh not sure if this is just a typo or what but that describes a file called deck-tailscale.sh which is not the same thing as tailscale.sh.

I think the repository you've downloaded based on those instructions is called deck-tailscale however a repository is a folder full of files, and tailscale.sh is ONE of those files. That repository's name would probably be /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale/ so if you're looking for tailscale.sh inside that repository it will be /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale/tailscale.sh. (two tailscales in the full path, one for the repo and one for the file itself)

You can verify all of these paths by using the ls <path> command, ls (that's L and S, not IS) means "list" and is similar the dir command in Windows, it will show if the file you specify exists, or if it is a directory it will list all the contents of that directory. ls is a useful command to explore the directories and see which ones exist and which ones don't. You can work your way up the path to see where things are going wrong, for example, if ls /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale/ does not exist, try ls /home/deck/documents/github/ and if that doesn't work try ls /home/deck/documents/ and so on

Second note: I notice your documents path is /home/deck/documents I don't have a steam deck in front of me to check, but my Linux system has a documents folder called /home/<me>/Documents with a capital D. Paths on Linux are always case-sensitive. That means /documents is not the same thing as /Documents, which is not the same as /DOCUMENTS/ and if you attempt to use one when it's actually the other, the file will not be found. Make sure the capitalization is correct in the whole path.

Step 2: Once you've located the correct path name of tailscale.sh you should be able to run it with: sudo <full-path-to-tailscale.sh>

Good luck.

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I navigated to the directory and clicked run in konsole. Clicking on deck-tailscale.sh in the directory itself and clicking run in konsole results in it saying could not find /home/deck/documents/github/deck-tailscale.sh.

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Something's not right. There shouldn't be a deck-tailscale.sh file. There's supposed to be a directory named deck-tailscale and a tailscale.sh and some other files inside it.

Here's what you do. First, open a terminal like Konsole. Just run the application, don't open it from the file manager. Then run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/tailscale-dev/deck-tailscale
cd deck-tailscale
sudo bash tailscale.sh

[email protected]

This probably is the issue, when you download a script or binary from the internet it doesn't have execution permission, you would have to right click on folder to open in terminal (that way don't have to cd to it), and check permissions with ls -la if it doesn't have permission, change it with chmod

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Well super that worked! Thanks. Now I just gotta figure out how to configure it.

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Step 1: Figure out where your tailscale.sh actually is.

find / -name "tailscale.sh" 2>/dev/null ?

Or with mlocate:

locate tailscale.sh ?

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Noob Tailscale questions