135 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
135 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
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I feel more and more limited by macOS when it comes to creative
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computational work. One of the systems I've read good things
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about, and that I fully support the philosophy around is NixOS. I
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decided to test it in a VPS.
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[^nixos]: NixOS is a DevOPS-inspired, Linux-based operating system
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built to be reproducible, declarative and reliable. It is also
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a package manager. To people that don't know it I like to
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explain it like if Ansible was an operating system. Check it
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out on https://nixos.org
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[^installation guide]: The official installation guide can be
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found at
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https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-configuration-syntax
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The top recommended hoster of NixOS is vps2day, which seems like a
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basic but okay hoster for testing the capabilities of the OS. What
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I found was that there were no online installation for NixOS on
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vps2day. After a bit back and forth I found that other guides were
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also working on vps2day. This article describes the procedure to
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get the system up and running (following the standard installation
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guide).
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The installation of NixOS was something new to me compared with the
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installer of other operating systems. NixOS by default only boots
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to a shell. With that shell the NixOS configuration files needs to
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be setup, which in turn installs things such as Grub on a given
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disk. In other words, when vps2day boots you into console the OS
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isn't installed yet.
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```
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% sudo su
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# partition the disk with swap
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% parted /dev/vda -- mklabel msdos
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% parted /dev/vda -- mkpart primary 1MiB -8GiB
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% parted /dev/vda -- mkpart primary linux-swap -8GiB 100%
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% mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/vda1
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% mkswap -L swap /dev/vda2
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# mount the nixos disk and enable swap
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% mount /dev/disk/by-label/nixos /mnt
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% swapon /dev/vda2
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# Generate configuration files
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% nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
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# Install a sensible text editor
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% nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' -iA emacs
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% emacs /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
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```
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You are now in the configuration file which defines the
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installation. For vps2day the following works to get a minimal
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server up and running.:
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```
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{ config, pkgs, ... }:
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{
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imports =
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[
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./hardware-configuration.nix
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];
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boot.loader.grub.enable = true;
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boot.loader.grub.version = 2;
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boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/vda"; # or "nodev" for efi only
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# networking.hostName = "nixos"; # Define your hostname.
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networking.useDHCP = false;
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networking.interfaces.ens3.useDHCP = true;
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time.timeZone = "Europe/Oslo";
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environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
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wget vim emacs
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];
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programs.mtr.enable = true;
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programs.gnupg.agent = { enable = true; enableSSHSupport = true; };
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services.openssh.enable = true;
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networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 22 ];
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# Define a user account. Don't forget to set a password with ‘passwd’.
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users.users.thetom = {
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isNormalUser = true;
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extraGroups = [ "wheel" ]; # Enable ‘sudo’ for the user.
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};
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system.stateVersion = "19.09";
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}
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```
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With that configuration, the provisioning of the server is
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ready.
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```
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# Install bootloader and other according to configuration.nix
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% nixos-install
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% reboot
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```
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The login prompt should be up and running and you
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can SSH into the server after the reboot.
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[^nixos-version]: The current version of NixOS can be checked with
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the command `nixos-version`.
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Finally upgrade to the current version according to the docs:
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```
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% nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-21.05 nixos
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% nix-channel --list | grep nixos
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% nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
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% reboot
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```
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[^drist]: Drist is a configuration management/deployment tool
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which is complementary to NixOS. While NixOS does all the
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setup on the server, Drist can be used to deploy
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configuration.nix and trigger rebuilds. Find Drist at
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https://dataswamp.org/\~solene/page-drist-official-website.html
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What is nice with this setup is that the configuration options
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are be documented in configuration.nix - so if we ever need to
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this again it can be simply achieved with a script in e.g. Drist.
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