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bbox - Oracle Cloud VPS
Platform NixOS aarch64
CPU Ampere Neoverse-N1 (4c/4t)
RAM 24 GB
Disk 200 GB (/dev/sda)
User nikhil
Boot GRUB (EFI removable)

Services

bbox uses the shared cloud server profile from hosts/nixos/common/cloud.nix:

  • Beszel hub - monitoring dashboard, agents from all hosts connect here
  • Caddy - reverse proxy (imperative config, no rebuild needed)
  • Tailscale - mesh VPN
  • Docker - system only (for OCI containers)

FileBrowser, Stirling PDF, and naste-server are intentionally not enabled on bbox; they stay on obox.

Modules Imported

imports = [
  (import ../common/cloud.nix { hostName = "bbox"; })
]
++ flake.inputs.nix-wire.lib.autoImport ./.;

Remote Install

bbox expects the sops age key at /home/nikhil/.config/sops/age/keys.txt. Stage it with --extra-files during the first install. The temp directory mirrors the target root because --extra-files copies its contents into /; --chown gives the copied key directory back to the final user so home-manager can write the rest of ~/.config.

user=nikhil
ip=<ip>

tmp="$(mktemp -d)"
trap 'rm -rf "$tmp"' EXIT

keydir="$tmp/home/$user/.config/sops/age"
install -d -m 700 "$keydir"
install -m 600 "$HOME/.config/sops/age/keys.txt" "$keydir/keys.txt"

nix run github:nix-community/nixos-anywhere -- \
  --build-on remote \
  --option accept-flake-config true \
  --option download-buffer-size 536870912 \
  --extra-files "$tmp" \
  --chown "/home/$user/.config/sops/age" "$user:users" \
  --generate-hardware-config nixos-generate-config ./hosts/nixos/bbox/hardware.nix \
  --flake "path:$PWD#bbox" \
  --target-host "root@$ip"

If the target starts from an Ubuntu cloud image, root SSH must accept the same key as ubuntu before running nixos-anywhere. If SSH asks for a root password after install, check that the local shell still has the right ssh-agent key loaded.

Secrets

Uses secrets/server.yaml:

  • tailscale_auth_key
  • beszel/token (agent), beszel/ssh_key, beszel/username, beszel/password (hub)

Files

  • hosts/nixos/common/cloud.nix - shared cloud server config and services
  • hosts/nixos/bbox/default.nix - host entrypoint
  • hosts/nixos/bbox/disk.nix - disko partitioning
  • hosts/nixos/bbox/hardware.nix - QEMU guest hardware
  • hosts/nixos/bbox/users/nikhil.nix - home-manager imports