nixos-systems

These are the system definitions for various systems being run by Gleipnir Technology.

Current Method

Start a new system

You'll need to spawn a new shell that has access to doctl, the Digital Ocean CLI.

You need to use something with at least 2GB RAM. This has to do with the limits of kexec, which nixos-anywherer uses to spawn a newly built shell. I tested it myself (see below).

You can get the list of available sizes via doctl compute size list. We're cheap, so we care about the small ones:

$ doctl compute size list
Slug                        Description                      Memory     VCPUs    Disk    Price Monthly    Price Hourly
s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb          Basic                            512        1        10      4.00             0.005950
s-1vcpu-1gb                 Basic                            1024       1        25      6.00             0.008930
s-1vcpu-1gb-amd             Basic AMD                        1024       1        25      7.00             0.010420
s-1vcpu-1gb-intel           Basic Intel                      1024       1        25      7.00             0.010420
s-1vcpu-1gb-35gb-intel      Basic Intel                      1024       1        35      8.00             0.011900
s-1vcpu-2gb                 Basic                            2048       1        50      12.00            0.017860
s-1vcpu-2gb-amd             Basic AMD                        2048       1        50      14.00            0.020830
s-1vcpu-2gb-intel           Basic Intel                      2048       1        50      14.00            0.020830
s-1vcpu-2gb-70gb-intel      Basic Intel                      2048       1        70      16.00            0.023810
s-2vcpu-2gb                 Basic                            2048       2        60      18.00            0.026790
s-2vcpu-2gb-amd             Basic AMD                        2048       2        60      21.00            0.031250
s-2vcpu-2gb-intel           Basic Intel                      2048       2        60      21.00            0.031250
s-2vcpu-2gb-90gb-intel      Basic Intel                      2048       2        90      24.00            0.035710
s-2vcpu-4gb                 Basic                            4096       2        80      24.00            0.035710
s-2vcpu-4gb-amd             Basic AMD                        4096       2        80      28.00            0.041670
s-2vcpu-4gb-intel           Basic Intel                      4096       2        80      28.00            0.041670
s-2vcpu-4gb-120gb-intel     Basic Intel                      4096       2        120     32.00            0.047620
s-2vcpu-8gb-amd             Basic AMD                        8192       2        100     42.00            0.062500

This chart may change, of course. With this we'll choose the s-1vcpu-2gb basic system. You'll want to pick the project to start the droplet from the list at doctl projects list. Then use digitalocean/create-droplet.sh to create the droplet.

$ digitalocean/create-droplet.sh

Convert to NixOS with nixos-anywhere

First log in to the host using regular credentials. Set up an ssh key for root access.

Get the disk layout using /sbin/fdisk -l. You're looking to figure out which disk is the boot disk and which isn't. Then update the disk-config.nix file for the matching provider to ensure that the boot disk gets written.

Then check the network configuration via ip route and ip addr or /etc/network/interfaces. Update the network configuration at network.nix to match.

Generate the hardware configuration

$ cd nixos-anywhere
$ nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- --flake ./#nocix --generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./nocix/hardware-configuration --target-host root@1.2.3.4

This apparently destroys the operating system. I'm not sure why.

$ cd nixos-anywhere
$ nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- --flake ./#nocix-amd-legacy-sexcore --target-host root@nocix-amd-legacy-sexcore.gleipnir.technology

This will take a while, maybe 20 minutes, but after you'll have a fully-functioning NixOS system with the correct SSH keys.

Adding a new host to the secrets

The host should create its own new ssh host key that lives at /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub. We're going to convert that into a sops key and add it to our key material.

On the server you just added run:

$ nix-shell -p ssh-to-age --run 'cat /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub | ssh-to-age'
age1lzzlx60f9ra4evdkn4l9px735mz7uxml5467ptzc4hg3t86gn9mq3ddsxy

This will produce an age key. Copy that into .sops.yaml. You'll want to add it to the list of keys at the top, then add it to any sections that the host should be able to read. Once that's done you'll need to add the key into each secret file's encryption with the following on a dev machine:

$ nix-shell -p sops --run "sops updatekeys secrets/example.yaml"

See the official sops-nix docs for details.

Switch-fix

I've added a tool, switch-fix to the deployment. From the docs:

"you set-rollback before you do your nixos-rebuild switch."
"you do cancel-rollback if it works"
"you wait if it doesn't, and the system should come back."

Successful avenues of exploration

nixos-anywhere

See failed section for stuff before this

Eventually got around to building a s-2vcpu-4gb system:

$ nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- --flake ./nixos-anywhere/flake.nix#digitalocean --target-host root@128.199.4.31

This worked and I was then able to ssh in as root. Interestingly, it has no /etc/nixos/* files (but the directory does exist). Resulting disk images:

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/vda: 80 GiB, 85899345920 bytes, 167772160 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: E0C9241B-89EA-4E2C-A0CD-04A3FDEFEDA2

Device       Start       End   Sectors  Size Type
/dev/vda1     2048      4095      2048    1M BIOS boot
/dev/vda2     4096   1028095   1024000  500M EFI System
/dev/vda3  1028096 167770111 166742016 79.5G Linux filesystem


Disk /dev/vdb: 482 KiB, 493568 bytes, 964 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/mapper/pool-root: 79.51 GiB, 85370863616 bytes, 166739968 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Next we'll try something at half that size

s-1vcpu-2gb works fine. We won't bother going smaller at this point.

Failed Avenues of Exploration

These are things that I wanted to have work, but just didn't in the way I had hoped.

Custom System Image

The idea here is to use NixOS to create a custom system image, upload it, and then start servers based on that image. It actually works really well, except that Digital Ocean categorically does not support IPv6 networking on custom images. That's bollocks.

Hat tip to the negation for some ideas here.

Build a custom image for Digital Ocean:

> nix-build digitalocean/custom-image.nix
...
/nix/store/rm84j1a5bskhg2z8gz633m4apjyg848c-digital-ocean-image
> ls -lh result/
nixos-image-digital-ocean-25.05pre-git-x86_64-linux.qcow2.gz  nix-support/

In order to "upload" the image to Digital Ocean you'll need to make the image available via URL. We can use Gleipnir static storage as an example:

rsync result/nixos-image-digital-ocean-25.05pre-git-x86_64-linux.qcow2.gz static.gleipnir.technology:/tmp

Make sure the image is accessible via a public URL. Then upload either through the web interface, or using doctl

> doctl compute image create "Gleipnir NixOS 25.05" -v --image-description "NixOS 25.05 with ssh keys for eliribble baked in" --image-distribution nixos-25.05 --image-url "https://static.gleipnir.technology/nixos-image-digital-ocean-25.05pre-git-x86_64-linux.qcow2.gz" --region sfo3 --tag-names nixos
ID           Name                    Type      Distribution    Slug    Public    Min Disk    Created
192948683    Gleipnir NixOS 25.05    custom    Unknown OS              false     0           2025-07-10T20:22:43Z1G

Then start a droplet using that image:

> doctl compute droplet create "test2.nidus.cloud" --enable-ipv6 --image 192948683 --project-id ce2159e8-02f5-4169-8943-f34ccf812d23 --region sfo3 --size s-1vcpu-1gb --ssh-keys 48777034 --tag-name nixos --wait
Error: POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets: 422 (request "116c778d-8e72-4099-a7c6-c3ad37557c4c") image is not compatible with ipv6

Oh. Well that sucks. Digital Ocean can't do IPv6 on custom images.

NixOS Infect via cloud-init

The idea here is to spawn a stock Debian system from Digital Ocean's supported image, then immediately infect it on boot to become a real NixOS system, but with proper IPv6 networking

I tried creating a cloud-init function based on NixOS-infect. You can see the content in digitalocean/infect-nixos.yaml. I added it to the startup command via doctl compute droplet create ... --user-data-file digitalocean/infect-nixos.yaml. This may have a way of working, but I don't get a log and it doesn't get infected, so something fundamental isn't working. I abandoned it.

Nixos-anywhere Investigation

First we start up a really small s-1vcpu-1gb. Then we try to install nixos via nixos-anywhere. Notice the --no-disko-deps which is recommended for very low RAM systems:

$ nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- --no-disko-deps --flake ./nixos-anywhere#digitalocean --target-host root@64.23.242.187

After an hour it was railed on the CPU at 100% and had been for an hour with no network data going anywhere. I gave up. Must be too small. Tried again with a larger system, s-2vcpu-4gb:

See successful investigations for what happened after that.