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[Solved] VPN (tailscale) connection issue each time i open the laptop

Hiya, so this is a problem I've run into recently using an image of Project Bluefin, hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction of solving this problem.

My issue is that, each time I close the lid of my laptop, and open it again I need to refresh Tailscale (take it down and up again), in order to be able to connect to the internet. Obviously, I can just do that each time, but it is a slight annoyance. Tailscale is built in, pre-installed, on the system image and this is an immutable distro. I don't know what this comes of, nor do I know how I could troubleshoot it in terms of looking at logs. So any pin pointers as towards helping me solve this would be greatly appreciated!

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4 comments
  • There is some information missing in the problem description. For example, if you close the lid, does the computer suspend/sleep/hibernate? It may be that when the computer sleeps something "breaks" or it may be that the act of physically closing/opening the lid has an effect (e.g. because the WiFi antenna is embedded in the display frame).

    Some time ago I had a similar problem with Tailscale and sleeping. When Tailscale initializes itself (at boot), it has to interact with another service to communicate which DNS servers have become available (e.g. 100.100.100.100). Several implementations of such services exist (resolvconf, openresolv), in my case systemd-resolved. During normal operation, resolvectl status (if using systemd-resolved) shows which DNS servers and which search domains are configured for each network interface such as tailscale0. Now, there is a bug (or feature) that systemd-resolved "forgets" the DNS configuration it got from Tailscale when the computer is put to sleep. So, when the computer wakes up, name resolution via Tailscale no longer works, giving you the impression that Tailscale itself is not working, although Tailscale's low-level functions are still operational. My "solution" was to write a small script that gets executed when the computer wakes up which sets again DNS server and search domain for network device tailscale0.

    • Thanks for this! I'll get to testing, and I'll check my settings to see if sleep/sus/hib has anything to do with it. But I am also likely to switch distro as im finding these immutable distros way to limited to my liking. (It's most likely just me not being able to figure out how to use immutable distros, but Its not for me quite yet at least).

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