[Help] tailscale, volume fail, resilience, apps and .main.inc
Posted: 05 Jul 2026, 19:20
I had a hard drive go on my terramaster, and the gui couldn't come up (I thought that's the point of a raid it can recover from that, but anyway....). with a lot of help from AI and typing obscure commands into a ssh shell I solved that. However...
I want to avoid this in the future, because I might not be here to login via failsafe ssh. so I bought an SSD to make my system disk. The trouble is, if this happens again I want to be able to get into it from a remote location and fix it, which means I need tailscale to come up. That means I want tailscale on the SSD system volume not the HDD volume which might be having issues.
I've tried everything, changing the app install location to /Volume2, removing the app, reinstalling it, removing the config in /Volume1/@apps/Tailscale, no matter what I do, it installs it on Volume1. So I tried to trace why it looks for it there, maybe I can change the startup to use /Volume2 if I copy it there. Well it turns out the startup is controlled from /etc/init.d/Tailscale/ and to summarise what all those scripts do, it is looking for the first volume that has a file called /VolumeX/.main.inc and that's where it tries to start.
So it's tempting to move that file to /Volume2, but I'm scared to, who knows what might break if I do that, or what created that file. Interestingly the content of the file is the mac address of my ethernet. Maybe Tailscale created that file? Do other people not using Tailscale have that file? Anybody know anything about it or why the Tailscale app insists on installing on /Volume1 ?
I want to avoid this in the future, because I might not be here to login via failsafe ssh. so I bought an SSD to make my system disk. The trouble is, if this happens again I want to be able to get into it from a remote location and fix it, which means I need tailscale to come up. That means I want tailscale on the SSD system volume not the HDD volume which might be having issues.
I've tried everything, changing the app install location to /Volume2, removing the app, reinstalling it, removing the config in /Volume1/@apps/Tailscale, no matter what I do, it installs it on Volume1. So I tried to trace why it looks for it there, maybe I can change the startup to use /Volume2 if I copy it there. Well it turns out the startup is controlled from /etc/init.d/Tailscale/ and to summarise what all those scripts do, it is looking for the first volume that has a file called /VolumeX/.main.inc and that's where it tries to start.
So it's tempting to move that file to /Volume2, but I'm scared to, who knows what might break if I do that, or what created that file. Interestingly the content of the file is the mac address of my ethernet. Maybe Tailscale created that file? Do other people not using Tailscale have that file? Anybody know anything about it or why the Tailscale app insists on installing on /Volume1 ?