Converting an old Windows XP laptop to Linux for use as a VPN with Tailscale

[CKoup]

Hi I'm completely new to this and I want to download Tailscale on an old windows XP laptop that has 1gb of ram and a 32bit processor. Of course I have to install Linux so is there any suggestion as to which of the supporting Linux distro's should I use? 
Thank you in advance!

[The Hope]

6 hours ago, CKoup said:

Hi I'm completely new to this and I want to download Tailscale on an old windows XP laptop that has 1gb of ram and a 32bit processor. Of course I have to install Linux so is there any suggestion as to which of the supporting Linux distro's should I use? 
Thank you in advance!

windowsXP is (very) unsafe for use as it has not received any security updates for over a decade.

Many Linux systems have discontinued 32 bit support.

1GB RAM is also problematic because you often don't use a mouse on a laptop and a window manager is therefore often less useful.

You can use FreeBSD with LXQt

https://www.freshports.org/security/tailscale/

If you don't mind screen tearing then Alpine Linux with XFCE is also ideal as Alpine uses very little RAM.

You can use MX Linux + fluxbox (or XFCE)

Devuan and XFCE/LXQt may also work well.

I have a very cheap and old netbook that cost less than 200 EUR and how Devuan runs on it is nothing short of phenomenal.

 

 

Those are technically the most optimal choices for slow hardware.

[maplepants]

Can I ask why? I'm a tailscale user myself and the way it's supposed to work is that you download tailscale onto every device and then it creates a peer to peer mesh network.

 

So I have it on my phone, my iPad, my gaming PC, my cloud VPS, my Mac, etc etc. Then the devices communicate with each other directly and you don't need a central machine managing the traffic, which it sounds like you're trying to create here.

[CKoup]

What I'm trying to do is this 

So I want this laptop to run at my home and connect all the other devices to it.  

[maplepants]

Okay, then this is a bad choice of machine. You'll be limited to how fast this old 32bit laptop can get the traffic from Netflix, encrypt in the VPN, and then send it out to the end user. I can't imagine it'll have the horse power for even 1 720p stream, let alone multiple streams at any resolution.

 

The instructions in that video are correct. And the steps are mostly identical for Linux as the exit node.

[10leej]

17 hours ago, maplepants said:

Okay, then this is a bad choice of machine. You'll be limited to how fast this old 32bit laptop can get the traffic from Netflix, encrypt in the VPN, and then send it out to the end user. I can't imagine it'll have the horse power for even 1 720p stream, let alone multiple streams at any resolution.

 

The instructions in that video are correct. And the steps are mostly identical for Linux as the exit node.

And yet that laptop is still likely more powerful in margins of 2 to 3x compared to the OPs home router. It's not even coming close to transcoding which is the work load your talking about. The laptop should work fine.

 

OP to answer your question on which distro, just pick one, Tailscale works on basically anything out there.

[maplepants]

On 6/24/2023 at 9:52 AM, 10leej said:

And yet that laptop is still likely more powerful in margins of 2 to 3x compared to the OPs home router. It's not even coming close to transcoding which is the work load your talking about. The laptop should work fine.

 

OP to answer your question on which distro, just pick one, Tailscale works on basically anything out there.

It might smoke his router in generic benchmarks, but that doesn't matter for this specific workload. 

 

Otherwise, you're right that any flavour of Linux will do this job equally well. So I'd say he should just pick something like Debian, Ubunt, or Fedora. Something that has loads of good guides to help new users, and that's popular enough that he can be sure any problem he has was already asked and answered on some stack exchange board.

[goatedpenguin]

windows xp, 1gb of ram and probably an age old processor for vpn I don't think it would even meet minimum requirements and on top of that 32 bit this would be a very slow vpn I recommend getting a second hand raspberry pi(it will be way faster and easier to manage) and use that as a vpn. If I may know, why not use openvpn instead of tailscale it is way faster since it is self hosted.

[10leej]

40 minutes ago, goatedpenguin said:

windows xp, 1gb of ram and probably an age old processor for vpn I don't think it would even meet minimum requirements and on top of that 32 bit this would be a very slow vpn I recommend getting a second hand raspberry pi(it will be way faster and easier to manage) and use that as a vpn. If I may know, why not use openvpn instead of tailscale it is way faster since it is self hosted.

It wouldn;t be that slow, the standard PCI interface was specced for it and most Core 2 32 bit systems can achieve it. Even then if it's for a exit node over an internet connection is very unlikely that the OP's internet connection is even 10% of their local network speeds in the US.

Tailscale will route over the local network, the central server is just for verification. Tailscale uses Wireguard's Mesh protocol and will check every access node in the path to the authority server if anything connected to the VPN network is connected and fall back to the most local option to the destination.

 

As in OP starts the tailscale daemon, it connects to tailscale's authority which says which public IP each other client is at, your client will then check every device on the same public IP first which usually is... your home. And your gateway/dhcp/dns server (aka your router) will do the rest in routing the traffic.

 

OpenVPN in this case will work, but I would rather use tailscale (or if you really wanna self host Headscale) as you wont need to worry about opening up any kind of port forwarding.

[goatedpenguin]

Ag

26 minutes ago, 10leej said:

It wouldn;t be that slow, the standard PCI interface was specced for it and most Core 2 32 bit systems can achieve it. Even then if it's for a exit node over an internet connection is very unlikely that the OP's internet connection is even 10% of their local network speeds in the US.

Tailscale will route over the local network, the central server is just for verification. Tailscale uses Wireguard's Mesh protocol and will check every access node in the path to the authority server if anything connected to the VPN network is connected and fall back to the most local option to the destination.

 

As in OP starts the tailscale daemon, it connects to tailscale's authority which says which public IP each other client is at, your client will then check every device on the same public IP first which usually is... your home. And your gateway/dhcp/dns server (aka your router) will do the rest in routing the traffic.

 

OpenVPN in this case will work, but I would rather use tailscale (or if you really wanna self host Headscale) as you wont need to worry about opening up any kind of port forwarding.

Agreed but having windows xp as an os would be insecure and would not be using the computer to its fullest capabilities so installing a lightweight linux distro like centos or arch linux (since it is very minimal and you have the power to install the necessary packages that are needed)would do good a job.

[10leej]

8 hours ago, goatedpenguin said:

Ag

Agreed but having windows xp as an os would be insecure and would not be using the computer to its fullest capabilities so installing a lightweight linux distro like centos or arch linux (since it is very minimal and you have the power to install the necessary packages that are needed)would do good a job.

Quote

Of course I have to install Linux so is there any suggestion as to which of the supporting Linux distro's should I use? 

OP is already aware of that

[E-waste]

I suggest Debian or rather LMDE, Linux Mint debian edition, with XFCE and once you get it setup how you want, set it up to only boot to command-line first, where it will only use 150-200MB of memory, and cache the rest into available memory.  Running XFCE will take up more memory when you aren't using it.

 

Enjoy re-using computer tools that still work, it's all just 1 and 0.