Hello everyone!
I'm would like to run tailscale on my MI 4A Gigabit so I can access the devices which connected to it from outside of my network.
I tried to install it opkg but it seems like the router doesn't have enough space for that.
Does it possible to install it on that router? alternatively, do you have recommended similar router which is cheap and efficient and support tailscale?
Tailscale is huge. I don't know if there is any router in the $30 price class with enough flash and RAM for it.
Consider zerotier instead.
I belive that running it from sdcard / usb will works pretty well,
I don't think it takes a lot of RAM
What? I didn't deleted
Just answering this in case someone else searches for the same in the future.
MI 4A Gigabit has 128MB. That's a no go even if tailscale is the only app on the router. It will probably lock up. With zram it will at least start and luci/ssh won't go totally to sh*t, but tailscale will prob working at soon as you start actually using it. The few seconds it worked, the speed was abysmal. Source: myself, just tested it with 2 different MT7621 based routers with 128MB ram.
It seemingly works fine on my R7800 with 512MB ram. Performance isn't great and a bit underwhelming; about 35mbs whereas the r7800 does around 300mbs with wireguard. But it's enough to stream 4K from all major platforms inlcuding my own Plex server, so good enough for me.
There are some writeups about minimizing the tailscale executable, and downloading it from the web, and combined executable for tailscale/tailscaled. I don’t know anything about that, I built openwrt 23.05.-snapshot from source together eith tailscale. It adds 5.5-6MB to the image.
Zerotier will work fine on 128MB ram, maybe even 64MB is enough. You can use zerotier as an exit node too but it’s requires a bit more configuring and it’s called «Default Route» which you can check inside the Zerotier app on your phone. The speeds were lower than Tailscale. I got 35mbs with tailscale in/out, but only 30mbs at most with Zerotier, and the speeds were fluctuating a lot. (I will update this when I have some time to do proper testing in my upcoming vacation) edit: tried with disabling sqm and enabled software offload instead and speeds were much better. At least 50mbs+ over 3G.
The biggest downside with zerotier is that the app is only for your phone and not for Apple TV/Google TV. It’s also slower to start and you have to reconnect manually when you want to turn on/off exit node or other things. The app for Tailscale is much better and you can also choose freely what machine in the network you want to use as an exit node, whereas with zerotier only 1 «default route» for each network. You can of course make seperate networks but with tailscale you can have machines all over the world interlinked within the same network and still choose freely the exit node. And of course the tailscale app is on both Apple TV and Google/Android TV so that makes it purrfect for my streaming needs.
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