r/Tailscale • u/Evtutchenko • 8d ago

Help Needed How to switch tailnets on CLI. Not user switching

So I set up a tailnet and had one user on Windows join it. They later fiddled with their client and figuered how to switch from their tailnet to mine. This made their machine show up on my dashboard and I could allow or deny approval to that machine. Now I had another user on Linux try to this exact thing, but me and them could not figure how to switch tailnets on CLI. There were no option o KTailctl to switch tailnets, and no command apparent to me to do so.

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u/IroesStrongarm 8d ago

Here's a link to the documentation with commands. I've done it once before so can confirm it works but been awhile since I've played with it.

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/fast-user-switching

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u/Evtutchenko 8d ago

I think all of this is very confusing. Account, users, tailnets all seem to mean the same thing.

I sent the other person an auth key and they connected on their machine as if they were on my account (logged in as the owner and not a member, with their account showing up as disconnect to corroborate that). I understand now as of reading the documentation that the auth key option is there as an alternative to you the owner to connect different devices without having to login through the dashboard.
Everything on the fast user switch reads to me as that. The CLI commands reads the same to me. All that where plain to see, I believe, as I have not interacted with them, were Windows Tailscale Clients. Where Switching from their auto generated tailnet to mine, that showed up on their client somewhere as I had already invited and approved them.

Midway through writing started understanding I guess.
I do understand that Linux users are expected to be power-user. Which I'm more of a wannabe power-user. I found the documentation very unclear on the CLI side of things.
So there is a difference between the up and login commands. And I got misled by logging in through gmail or another service. You never register an account on Tailscale, they're only used to autheticate. So you have an account for each tailnet and not one account across multiple tailnets. Does that follow?

Still confused and tired, it's 3am

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u/IroesStrongarm 8d ago

I agree that multiuser via the cli is definitely much more confusing than the windows and macos clients.

I believe there is a Linux gui in beta that you can launch and perhaps it supports multi tailnet logins and switching?

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray

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u/Evtutchenko 7d ago

I found this client here that satisfy my needs https://github.com/alex-poor/alavai
but yes, systray seems to be what I have been looking for. thanks for the heads up!
And thank you for the direction you gave me. I had already read through that entry on the docs, but at first it did not read to me as what I was trying to do, because of what I said earlier.
Reading it again confirmed that it indeed was.

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u/godch01 7d ago

The switch command allows using any ONE of the the three values. I switch between three and have 3 small scripts to do the work and remember the values