[Enhancement] node list and exit node list cannot be populated when using non-standard custom IP Range in headscale

[L1ttleFlyyy]

Hi! first of all thanks for developing this useful plugin!

Disclaimer: Ultimately this should be a issue with tailscale-cli, so I will open one on their repo sometimes later. But since this is headscale + non standard config, I wouldn't expect tailscale official to fix their cli binary any time soon, so I had to seek help from the UI side.

So what's the problem?
I am using self-hosted headscale network and assigning non-standard IPs to my nodes. The non-standard IP is crucial to allow some of my devices to use tailscale and other VPN services together with out routing conflict on the 100.x.y.z ip range.

Tailscale works mostly flawless without any connection issue. There is only one small UI issue with tailscale-cli, that it won't be able to print the IPs of other nodes.

As a result, this plugin won't be able to properly populate the nodelist when parsing the following result:

bazzite@bazzite:~$ tailscale status
172.27.143.7    bazzite              mobile       linux   -
                fedora               home         linux   active; offers exit node; xxxx
                mac                  mobile       macOS   offline
                mycone               cloud        linux   -
                myiphone             mobile       iOS     -
                powercube            home         windows active; direct xxxx
                tricone              cloud        linux   active; offers exit node; xxxx

bazzite@bazzite:~$ tailscale ping 172.27.143.4
pong from fedora (172.27.143.4) via 192.168.50.60:41641 in 4ms

bazzite@bazzite:~$ tailscale ping fedora
node found but lacks an IP

Tailscale-iOS and Tailscale-windows GUI apps all works fine and can properly populate node list and set them as exit node. Here is an example in
iOS app vs Decky:

I will take a look at your the source code and create an PR when I figure it out. For now I wanna keep this for record.

[saumya-banthia]

@L1ttleFlyyy as you have correctly pointed out, this does seem to be a tailscale-cli UI issue. I do not have a headscale setup, so developing for it would further be a challenge. From the tailscale status command output you have shared, it seems the only IP (a unique identifier) it is able to get for the custom IP range setup is for the device that it's run on. Furthermore the IP is a necessity for setting the exit node (there aren't other UID's which can be used in it's place to my knowledge). Let's hope tailscale can push a fix soon, if you do open that issue on the tailscale repo, please mention this issue as part of the same. For now, I would not be closing this issue.

[saumya-banthia]

@L1ttleFlyyy found a temp fix, pushing to store in some time. I would mention you when raising the PR, you can test and confirm if the feature works as intended.

[L1ttleFlyyy]

Hi @saumya-banthia, I was able to mess around with your latest commit. I think the UI is working fine. At least it is not crashing when I set it to some non-existing IP, the same ip as the localhost, or some random string.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help to resolve my issue because I just found that tailscale-cli is totally incapable of setting the exit-node at all. I should have tried this before filing this issue to you. My apologies. Really sorry about that.
So basically, no matter if I do tailscale set --exit-node=fedora or tailscale set --exit-node=172.27.143.4, it fails. It complains "node found but lacks an IP" or "can't find node" if setting by IP directly.
I will need to follow up on the tailscale/tailscale#15836
Fortunately, tailscale-cli is open-source, I might be able to identify a solution there.

[saumya-banthia]

@L1ttleFlyyy in that case, it does seem a tailscale-cli issue, I don't think I can do much there at this time. Will still keep this issue open (at least for now), in case there are updates from the issue you have raised on the tailscale repo.