Docs:03.4 Tinc Automation

This page was last edited on 19 February 2025, at 15:19.

Start Tinc automatically

We will now make the server and nodes (if you want them to) automatically setup and run the VPN. We are now going to get tinc to launch automatically with systemd

Create a systemd service file

Systemd is a way to manage (start/stop) services like VPNs etc. Tinc is such a service.

To do this you will create a new service file in the folder /etc/systemd/system

In this case we create a special kind of service file (that has an @ in the name) that allows it to work for multiple network names.

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/tinc@.service

Inside that file, paste the following:

[Unit] 
Description=Tinc (%i) 
After=network.target 

[Service] 
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/etc/tinc
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/tincd -D -n %i
ExecReload=/usr/local/sbin/tincd -D -n %i -kHUP 
TimeoutStopSec=5 
Restart=always 
RestartSec=60 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Starting Tinc service

Now we can start it with the command below:

Syntac:

sudo systemctl start tinc@<NETNAME>

so we did:

sudo systemctl start tinc@systerserver

Start service automatically

To make the VPN start automatically we enable it with:

Syntax:

sudo systemctl enable tinc@<NETNAME>

So we did:

sudo systemctl enable tinc@systerserver

Debug if any tinc servers are running

If you are having issues you can debug with:

systemctl --type=service | grep tinc