Tailscale drops the network and logs out when using Fast User switching. How should it configured such that this does not happen and the VPN remains connected? For other VPN connections macOS offers the ability to keep connected while switching users, but for the Tailscale connection no such option is offered.
Unlike other VPNs, Tailscale’s connections are tied directly to your identity, so fast user switching logging you out is intentional. If you’re signed in as a different user, you might be able to access different things. Of course, we fail to reconnect when you switch back, but that’s a bug we plan to fix.
However, it sounds like you want Tailscale to run as the system, and to use the same Tailscale account across all user accounts. Can you give a little more context on how you hope to use this feature?
We offer something similar on Windows/Linux as a “server mode” to help support teams that share access to a single server with many user accounts. I can note down your request for the same thing for macOS if you’d like.
The user scenario is I have multiple accounts (myself, my wife and my daughter) on my macOS machine downloading their own iCloud stored data (documents, photos, etc). I am using tailscale to connect to my Synology NAS both at home and when I am traveling with my MacBook Pro. This allows me to use Resilio sync to backup all of our iCloud data to the NAS efficiently. I need only one account to connect to the NAS since it is a central repository for our data and not separated by user accounts. Hence having tailscale run as the system would be great.
Good to know. I’ve filed this Github issue to track our work on this, but we likely won’t be able to build it for a few months to come.
That said, if we fix the other bug I linked, this should become much easier too. Logging in on each user account once should then properly auto re-connect when you switch, which is hopefully much less painful than having to log in each time.
Thanks a lot. This would be very helpful even to get the bug fixed.