Hey y’all, I know getting a setup that feels “right” can be a process. We all have different goals, tech preferences, etc.

I wanted to a share my blog post walking through how I finally built a setup that I can just be happy with and use. It goes over my goals, requirements, tech choices, layout, and some specific problems I’ve resolved.

Where I’ve landed of course isn’t where everyone else will, but I hope it can serve as a good reference. I’ve really benefited from the content and software folks have freely shared, and hope I can continue that and help others.

Happy to answer questions!

  • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    this is great! i was intrigued by nix and nixOS early into my linux venture and this has probably pushed me to start moving my stuff from Debian, though i am kinda addicted to proxmox.

    but the way you’re doing truenas is how I’m running my stuff too. way more planning on your end really cleans it all up!

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      Funny - same thing here. Got 3 proxmox hosts running, all virtual machines are NixOS though.

      I’d love to go full Nix, but between my GF and I, we kinda split the responsibilities: hardware is hers, applications are mine. And there’s not a chance she’ll give up her Proxmox hosts 😄

      Got it automated to a single “provision” command though that will spin up any of my nix VMS unanttended, so I’m happy with that.

      • mirdaki@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        4·
        4 days ago

        Oh that provision command sounds interesting! Did it take a bit of tinkering to get right?

        • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          4 days ago

          Yeah, but no dark magic involved.

          • build image
          • copy to proxmox ISO store
          • import, resize disk
          • start, wait to come online
          • read ssh pubkey, save it
          • rekey secrets
          • rebuild VM

          The only “magic” parts are two nix modules for handling proper networking and hardware setup, and exposing required attributes to the script.

          Works really well, zero manual config (beyond the services you want to run…) required on nix or proxmox side.

    • mirdaki@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      I really do encourage experimenting more with NixOS. It’s the strange combination of feeling safer (because of the rollbacks) and more powerful (because of all the modules and packages already setup by the community)

      I also spent a while using Proxmox. Almost went with it over TrueNAS. It was a little bit of a tossup, one is a good VM manager with ZFS support and the other good ZFS manger with VM support. I ended up just liking the interface better for TrueNAS, but both are certainly capable

      • ell1e@leminal.spaceEnglish
        4·
        4 days ago

        A rolling back mechanism is the best thing to have for server tweaks. I achieve the same with docker. Something similar might be possible with FreeBSD Jails, podman, or anything similar like that. (Not that NixOS is a bad choice, I just wanted to share some more options for anybody looking for some to try.)