Hi, everyone. The high-level overview: I'm trying to install Tailscale <https://tailscale.com/> as a portable service on my Steam Deck.
Tailscale is a point-to-point VPN service, essentially a wrapper around Wireguard that helps with network setup and management. The Steam Deck is Valve's handheld PC running SteamOS 3, which is derived from Arch. It uses an A/B partition system for system files, meaning you can't install a service the normal way. There *is* a guide to do this <https://tailscale.com/blog/steam-deck/>, posted on their own blog, but it uses system extensions which aren't good for services that you want to run on startup. Indeed, following that guide puts me in a state where I have to manually start the daemon every time I reboot my Deck, even with the service enabled. Let's move on to how I've started to do this. Tailscale is available through most package managers, but they also publish static binaries with systemd unit files <https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/#static>. This script grabs that binary, extracts it, and moves it into a portable service directory structure. # download and extract Tailscale tarball="$(curl -s 'https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/?mode=json' | jq -r .Tarballs.amd64)" version="$(echo ${tarball} | cut -d_ -f2)" tar_dir="$(echo ${tarball} | cut -d. -f1-3)" curl -s "https://pkgs.tailscale.com/stable/${tarball}" -o tailscale.tgz tar xzf tailscale.tgz test -d $tar_dir # Set up our target directory structure mkdir -p tailscaled/{usr/{bin,sbin,lib/systemd/system},etc,proc,sys,dev,run,/var/tmp} # Copy tailscale-distributed files to the right place cp -rf $tar_dir/tailscaled tailscaled/usr/sbin/tailscaled cp -rf $tar_dir/systemd/tailscaled.service tailscaled/usr/lib/systemd/system/tailscaled.service # Write service os-release file source /etc/os-release cp -rf /etc/os-release tailscaled/etc/os-release Not automated yet is patching the provided unit file - you need to remove the EnvironmentFile line and "--port $PORT $FLAGS" options, and add [Exec] Environment="PATH=/usr/bin" Attach the portable service: sudo portablectl attach ./tailscaled --profile=trusted and try starting it: sudo systemctl start tailscaled It fails, leaving this in the logs: logtail started Program starting: v1.30.2-t24c524c78-gc399ae6fa, Go 1.19.1-tsb13188dd36: []string{"/usr/sbin/tailscaled", "--state=/var/lib/tailscale/tailscaled.state", "--socket=/run/tailscale/tailscaled.sock"} LogID: 0f59ed267a2b19cc28aac9ee7119914000ca478234af8d56893a025ae72cc647 logpolicy: using $STATE_DIRECTORY, "/var/lib/tailscale" wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") ... wgengine.NewUserspaceEngine(tun "tailscale0") error: creating router: could not get iptables version: fork/exec /usr/bin/iptables: no such file or directory flushing log. logger closing down createEngine: creating router: could not get iptables version: fork/exec /usr/bin/iptables: no such file or directory iptables is, in fact, at /usr/bin/iptables, so what am I missing? Before I added the Environment line, I was getting errors that iptables wasn't on the PATH, so I suspect that now tailscaled can *see* iptables, but systemd isn't letting tailscaled run it. Thanks for having a look at this.