Operating Tailscale Agent Hosts

Turn an existing Linux machine into a private, persistent coding-agent worker without exposing SSH or development ports to the public internet.

Core Rules

Treat Tailscale as the private network path; still configure a service to accept SSH, desktop, or HTTP traffic.
Prefer Tailscale SSH and narrowly scoped access rules over public SSH or router port forwarding.
Keep privileged operations and OAuth approval user-driven; never request passwords or expose tokens in logs.
Verify unattended boot instead of assuming it: networking, Tailscale, sleep policy, encrypted-disk prompts, and services are separate concerns.
Use tmux for persistence and git worktrees for concurrent mutating agents.
Bind dev servers to localhost and expose them with Tailscale Serve when possible.
Transfer configuration selectively; exclude credentials, histories, caches, databases, host keys, and machine-specific trust records by default.