Homelab

The configuration of my home infrastructure.

Laptop

My main laptop, a Lenovo X230, runs NixOS.

Its configuration is specified in x230.nix using the experimental flakes feature. Modify this file and switch to the new configuration:

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .

By default, this configuration is stored in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.

For testing purposes you can build a QEMU virtual machine from the configuration:

nixos-rebuild build-vm --flake .

To update the lock files:

nix flake update --update-input nixpkgs --commit-lock-file

Servers

The entrypoint for my home server setup is home.nix. This configuration is deployed using nixops. A one-time setup is required if the deployment doesn't exist yet:

nix shell -c nixops create --name home --flake .

Then, run the following command to deploy:

nix shell -c nixops deploy

This builds the system configurations locally and copies the resulting closures to the remote machines.

Installing a new NixOS system

Installing a new system takes only a few manual steps.

Create a customized installer ISO image using the command mentioned at the top of installer/iso.nix.

Copy the ISO image to a USB stick and boot the computer from it. Connect to the installer using SSH:

ssh root@nixos -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o 'UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null'

Execute the relevant lines from /etc/install.sh to partition the disk and create file systems.

Use the basic configuration from /etc/configuration.nix as default and set the hostname.

Run the installer then reboot the machine. The installation of the basic system is done.

Continue the systems's management using NixOps.

Useful commands

The configuration.nix(5) man page documents all the available options for configuring the system:

man configuration.nix

All supported options are searchable online:

https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html

Query available packages:

nix search nixpkgs wget

Install a package into the user's profile

nix profile install nixpkgs#firefox

Remove old, unreferenced packages, system-wide:

sudo nix-collect-garbage
sudo nix-collect-garbage -d  # also delete old system old configurations

This is documented in the Cleaning the Nix Store section of the NixOS manual.

The builtin functions of the Nix evaulator:

https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-builtins

See the version of this repository from which the system's configuration was built:

nixos-version --json

Router

Linksys WRT ACM-3200 running OpenWRT.

First time setup

Connect to the router with an Ethernet cable.

Download and install the firmware from https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/linksys_wrt3200acm then run:

router/setup.sh --first-time

Reboot the router.

Customizations

Change the settings in router/config and run

router/setup.sh

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

Raspbian

Setup SD card:

wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest
unzip -p raspbian_lite_latest | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
# remove then reinsert SD card
pmount /dev/mmcblk0p1
touch /media/mmcblk0p1/ssh
pumount /dev/mmcblk0p1

NixOS

The official NixOS images boot without any problems. Download the latest aarch64 SD card image from Hydra.

Flash the image to an SD card as described in the previous section.

Boot the system then start an SSH server and set a temporary password for the root user:

systemctl start sshd
passwd root

The password is only used for the first time access. Password authentication will be disabled later. Connect to the freshly booted system using SSH.

If you want to manage Pi using NixOps, there's some extra steps required.

NixOps compiles all managed systems on the control PC where it runs. Then, it copies the binaries to the target systems. This works well for i686 and amd64 architectures but it doesn't work for aarch64.

I tried to setup cross-compilation to aarch64, but it didn't work.

The trick is to add the newly created Raspberry Pi as an aarch64 remote build machine for Nix. This way the required packages will be built natively on the Pi itself (or other aarch64 remote build nodes, if you have any). In practice, almost nothing is built from source, because the required derivations are pulled from the offical Nix binary cache.

See the section nix.buildMachines in x230.nix, which shows how to add the Pi to your control PC's remote build pool. Enable some Raspberry Pi specific arguments in the hardware specification and use NixOps as usual.

NodeMCU

I have a couple of NodeMCU boards which can be configured using the scripts in the nodemcu directory.

Enter a Nix shell

$ cd nodemcu
$ nix-shell

In this shell the following helper functions are available.

Erase everything from the device and start from scratch:

• flash_erase: Perform Chip Erase on SPI flash
• flash_write: Write the Tasmota firmware to the device

Open an interactive serial terminal:

serial_terminal

Restore the firmware's factory settings:

device_reset | commit

Configure a device

device_config <WIFI_SSID> <WIFI_KEY> | commit

These commands are defined as shell hooks in shell.nix

Provisioning

The best way I found to provision the ESP8266 systems with custom firmware is through MQTT because it's not always easy to get access to a serial terminal.

Use the serial console or the web interface to connect the device to the WiFi and to the MQTT broker.

Built and run the provisioning script:

nix build -f provision.nix && ./result

This will reconfigure all the devices by executing the specified commands.