This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nixos by /u/chrillefkr on 2024-07-05 07:50:07+00:00.

Hey guys’n’gals! Just wanted to share something I made:

I’ve recently installed NixOS on multiple machines (about 6), as I finally upgraded my home lab to run on NixOS (yaay), and I also installed NixOS on a Hetzner server a few weeks ago.

Installation methods varied a lot. At first I just used the official minimal installer ISO to boot target machine, setup SSH, copy over configuration, format disks with Disko, nixos-install and reboot. But this required some sort of physical access or KVM to the target machine, which was difficult at times.

So I modified the installer ISO to connect the machine to my mesh VPN through Netbird (love that service btw) on boot, so that I could get remote access to the target machine, and continue the installation just from my laptop. This came in handy, as part of my “home” lab is on another “site” (siblings apartment in another town), and my visit there was short, so I was able to complete the installation from home.

On my Hetzner (root server) I simply installed Nix in the rescue environment and installed from there.

After all these repetitive installs I realized that I wanted a way to just plug in a USB drive and reboot, and the system should be installed automatically. So I made it! It relies on Disko for formatting drives. And I think it should be compatible with most (if not all) nixos-generators. I think I’ll try it with PXE booting eventually… I hope this comes to use for somebody else. Have a nice weekend!