What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
Personally I’m finally reaping the fruits of my labour and enjoy my stable homelab without doing much. One node went down recently and the other took over until I restarted so I was not in a hurry to fix things. Enjoying family time and only running updates that aren’t automated (yet). I’m about to dig a bit deeper into logging, probably setting up central log collection like Loki at some point, but not yet.
I installed a new server at home and went with NixOS. It looks super cool but it takes so much time to learn everything. The only thing keeping me from going back to Debian is how easy it was to permanently mount drives (and save a configuration for any future install or mishaps).
(I.e. mount,
nixos-generate-config,nixos-rebuild switchand done!)I don’t think it’s possible to learn everything for NixOS as a casual user / admin. It’s massive. I was luckily able to sneak a NixOS project into work which gave me some paid time on the topic. But there’s always room to learn more about it. Which is a good thing - by its nature, it’s just more powerful than conventional distributions.
I meant more figuratively. Finally managed to move my compose files to nix files thanks to compose2nix. One thing that throw me for a loop was that podman (or perhaps nix) creates a service named <backend>-<service>. Compose2nix handles this accordingly but I had a few hours of head scratching until I figured that out.
Good luck on the journey! What I meant is that over time, you’ll realize that what you did was probably not the most elegant was to do something, at least that’s my experience with my config. Like, I started with a flake with an explicit config for each machine (basically multiple nixosConfigurations) and then turned it into a lib with functions to turn a set of hosts from json into an attribute set (kind of a simple inventory done). My last efforts that are still ongoing (cough) are splitting my NixOS modules off into a separate flake using flake-parts.
I do understand you meant having the stuff that your need work, I just wanted to hint that the language is very powerful and as such, most configurations have room for improvement, as in learning to do things more efficient or do things that weren’t possible before.
More powerful = more mental burden and capacity used to know how to run and manage its unique syntax and structure.
Sincerely NIX user daily. Switching away from nix and off to fedora kinoite.
You might have some luck with Suse, their Yast configuration is very easy and was stable for years for me. Now I’m running on an M1 Mac mini which was more of a pain than a regular setup for sure. Unfortunately the Linux support just isn’t there yet.