NixOS server

This is my homeserver running NixOS. It makes heavy use of containers in order to organize processes.

Containers

The file host.nix has a whole load of code which basically allows one to specify services in the service/ directiory, which are then ran in seperate NixOS containers.

Disk setup

• root filesystem
  • The root FS is on a 128GB SATA SSD running EXT4. (also used for vfat boot partiotion)
  • Nothing fancy, just reliable and slightly faster root.
• container storage
  • The container storage is a ZFS pool
  • Its running on a mirror configuration with 1TB disk pairs (currently one pair)
  • It has a blocksize of 1M to accomodate serving large media files (FLAC music, 4K movies, series, etc). This is deemed more important than DB performance in this application
  • It is compressed using ZFS standard LZ4 compression to save space
  • A 7 day window of snapshots are kept on the drive
  • A lot of inspiration where taken from the following sources
    • Official OpenZFS docs
    • https://jrs-s.net/2018/08/17/zfs-tuning-cheat-sheet/
    • https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/ZFS
    • https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/
    • https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/NixOS/index.html
• backups
  • Backups are made to a second pool on an external drive
  • All snapshots are sent over to this drive, and they are not deleted
  • It runs slower GZ based compression to minimize space taken
  • TODO: what do I do when this is full?