Tailscale Shared Node and ACL issue

A few months ago I started using Tailscale to wire all my infrastructure, it’s one of the biggest digital quality of life improvement I got this year. Anyway, after having an open-bar networking I decided to add ACLs to restrict communications between servers, nothing much crazy. I use Prometheus to scrape my servers metrics, and push them on one of my friend’s Cortex via a shared Tailscale node.

Everything was working nice until I started applying tags on my nodes. Now I can’t contact any of my friend’s shared nodes from any of my tagged nodes, even if ACL rules are open any-any.

I used my search-fu and found a thread on Tailscale forum explaining the situation¹, here’s the quick explanation:

• a node without tag is own by You, e.g. foo@github
• a node with a tag is owned by the Tailscale Network
• a node is shared to You (foo@github), not a Tailscale Network
• you can’t remove tags from a node without removing/importing it
• the whole thing is a Tailscale backend limitation

I can’t find a the issue on a tracker, but hope this limitation will be gone once sharing is no longer a beta feature².

Happy networking