3. Installation

If you use Debian, you may want to install one of the precompiled packages for your system. These packages are equipped with system startup scripts and sample configurations.

If you cannot use one of the precompiled packages, or you want to compile tinc for yourself, you can use the source. The source is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Download the source from the download page, which has the checksums of these files listed; you may wish to check these with md5sum before continuing.

Tinc comes in a convenient autoconf/automake package, which you can just treat the same as any other package. Which is just untar it, type ‘./configure’ and then ‘make’. More detailed instructions are in the file ‘INSTALL’, which is included in the source distribution.

3.1 Building and installing tinc

Detailed instructions on configuring the source, building tinc and installing tinc can be found in the file called ‘INSTALL’.

If you happen to have a binary package for tinc for your distribution, you can use the package management tools of that distribution to install tinc. The documentation that comes along with your distribution will tell you how to do that.

3.1.1 Darwin (MacOS/X) build environment

In order to build tinc on Darwin, you need to install the MacOS/X Developer Tools from http://developer.apple.com/tools/macosxtools.html and a recent version of Fink from http://fink.sourceforge.net/.

After installation use fink to download and install the following packages: autoconf25, automake, dlcompat, m4, openssl, zlib and lzo.

3.1.2 Cygwin (Windows) build environment

If Cygwin hasn’t already been installed, install it directly from http://www.cygwin.com/.

When tinc is compiled in a Cygwin environment, it can only be run in this environment, but all programs, including those started outside the Cygwin environment, will be able to use the VPN. It will also support all features.

3.1.3 MinGW (Windows) build environment

You will need to install the MinGW environment from http://www.mingw.org.

When tinc is compiled using MinGW it runs natively under Windows, it is not necessary to keep MinGW installed.

When detaching, tinc will install itself as a service, which will be restarted automatically after reboots.

3.2 System files

Before you can run tinc, you must make sure you have all the needed files on your system.

3.2.1 Device files

Most operating systems nowadays come with the necessary device files by default, or they have a mechanism to create them on demand.

If you use Linux and do not have udev installed, you may need to create the following device file if it does not exist:

mknod -m 600 /dev/net/tun c 10 200

3.2.2 Other files

‘/etc/networks’

You may add a line to ‘/etc/networks’ so that your VPN will get a symbolic name. For example:

myvpn 10.0.0.0

‘/etc/services’

You may add this line to ‘/etc/services’. The effect is that you may supply a ‘tinc’ as a valid port number to some programs. The number 655 is registered with the IANA.

tinc            655/tcp    TINC
tinc            655/udp    TINC
#                          Ivo Timmermans <ivo@tinc-vpn.org>

This document was generated by Debian Build Daemon on April 25, 2013 using texi2html 1.82.