Connect clients

ownscale works with the official Tailscale clients. The only difference from using Tailscale’s hosted service is that each client must be told to use your organization’s login server, https://<org>.<BASE_DOMAIN>, instead of Tailscale’s servers. The console shows this URL in its header.

Install the client for your platform from tailscale.com/download, then point it at the login server as shown below.

sudo tailscale up --login-server=https://abcd.example.com

Open the printed URL and sign in, or use an auth key with --authkey.

Ways to authorize a machine

A machine joins the tailnet in one of three ways:

Interactive sign-in. tailscale up prints a URL. Open it and sign in with your ownscale account. The machine is owned by you.
Register from the console. Click Register machine on the Machines page, paste the registration key or URL printed by tailscale up, and pick the member who will own the machine. Use this for headless machines where opening a browser is impractical.
Auth key. Create a key on Pre-auth Keys and run tailscale up --login-server=… --authkey <key>. Nothing is opened in a browser. Best for servers, containers and CI. See Auth keys.

Each organization has its own login server. A client logged in to one organization can’t see machines in another. To switch, log out (tailscale logout) and log in to the other login server.

For CLI flags beyond --login-server and --authkey, see Tailscale’s CLI reference.

Quickstart