Hardwood Homelab

Set up the Development Environment

So long as you are already running NixOS on the workstation:

$ nix-shell

Build the ISO

This takes a little bit to build, mostly during the compression stage at the end. Also this assumes you have Ventoy already installed on the USB drive (/dev/sdc).

$ nix build '.#nixosConfigurations.iso.config.system.build.isoImage'
$ mkdir -p mnt
$ sudo mount /dev/sdc1 mnt
$ sudo cp result/iso/*.iso
$ sudo umount mnt

If you want to get really, ultra, fancy: tell Ventoy to automatically boot from this new ISO file by placing this in mnt/ventoy/ventoy.json before unmounting:

{
  "control": [
    { "VTOY_MENU_TIMEOUT": "10" },
    { "VTOY_DEFAULT_IMAGE": "/nixos-minimal-00.00-abcdef.iso" },
    { "VTOY_SECONDARY_TIMEOUT": "10" }
  ]
}

Deploy a Machine

Insert the USB and boot the target machine, after about a minute, you should be able to SSH into the target machine as root with the private key corresponding to the public key in hosts/iso/configuration.nix.

Once you verify access, verify the right devices in lsblk and then run the following:

$ nixos-anywhere \
    --flake '.#cherry' \
    --generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./hosts/cherry/hardware-configuration.nix \
    -i ~/.ssh/bandit_root@hardwood.cloud \
    --target-host root@cherry.hardwood.cloud

Once the command exits, pull the USB drive from the machine and you should be able to SSH in with the private key corresponding to the public key in hosts/common/hardwood-cluster.nix.

Updates

$ for HOST in cherry hickory maple; do nixos-rebuild switch --flake ".#${HOST}" --target-host "root@${HOST}.hardwood.cloud"; done