Soap boxing here but I feel these kinds of use cases is what NixOS is built for.

Declarative config to setup the system, users, and apps.

Declarative and customizable impermanence exactly how you want it.

I use Tails as well but NixOS is my daily driver. Anything not marked explicitly to persist is dropped each reboot. I’m the only user so I keep the last 30 days of non persisted data for like a power outage but that’s something I had to go out of my to setup for my use case.

1000% this. I’m now rediscovering my rather fluid gender identity and attraction to both genders that started in my late 30s. Looking back, all the signs were there, I just kept things private as it wasn’t socially acceptable. Had some outlet with the teen goth scene, which was nonexistent in college. Grew up in a heavily catholic influenced region.

Have an awesome wife who is supportive and revealed she is (now was) also closet bi from the same generation.

We moved away from there, but when I visit family all the churches are run down and closed. I smile every time knowing their grip is loosening. All the LGBT hate today just tastes like desperation.

There is anonymity and pseudonymity.

Do you need your opsec to be resistant to state-level actors (oppressive regime, censorship, illegal activities)? Well then you need to make sure you don’t introduce anything that will deanonomize you.

Are you trying to be resistant to mass data collection efforts used for profit? Being on the pseudonymity spectrum is a good step.

Dealing with the latter is like dealing with a bully. Make it not worth their time. They just want to put you in bucket X so they can estimate the most likely way to influence you for reason Y. Pseudonymity is about having multiple aliases that get put into different buckets so their privacy invasive efforts are less effective.

I’m both experienced and know jack shit because there is just too much to learn. I just started using it (1998ish) to make cool looking UIs. Its been my daily driver for 15 years now.

You will never learn it all. Over time you may become more familiar with the terminal or you may not. Doesn’t matter. You do you.

Its pretty easy to test drive. Grab a distros “Live CD” version, put in on a thumb drive, reboot and play around. This wont be persistent. When you’re ready, install it on an external SSD. Play around some more now that your edits will be persistent. You’ll mess up. Take notes. Start again once you’ve hosed your system.

GrapheneOS provides an auto-reboot feature which reboots locked devices after a set period of time to put data at rest. A countdown timer is started each time the device is locked, and the device will reboot if a successful unlock doesn’t occur before the timer reaches zero.

https://grapheneos.org/features#auto-reboot

Essentially it drops the decryption key derived from your unlock pattern / code. Attacks to access files while the decryption key is loaded, even if the phone is locked, are mitigated. The only things that works after a reboot are phone calls, SMS, and the alarm clock. I have mine set to reboot every 4 hours of inactivity.

I believe this feature is to not only to mitigate your average attacker but also law enforcement threat levels who purchase exploit kits. Can’t do much without the decryption key so they are left with slow brute force attacks.

This is why we trust but verify. Thanks mom for teaching me that cruel lesson of unplugging the phone cord to get me to bed (dial up days). It lasted about a week before I caught on you always came up from the basement before bed.

I’m so glad you never noticed I swapped my line with the guest bedroom. Also glad that ancient block in the basement could be hand wired.

The original used XI where it was 9 or 11 depending on the side.

edit: Nope I was wrong. That post links this one, lol.

https://infosec.pub/post/19153879

For our lower environments we use rsync like the author but skip the pipeline altogether. The servers have a watch script to restart when files are rsynced. We then have a local watch script that rsyncs on file changes.

Relatively instant deploy (2-5s) whenever a file is saved.

Sounds like one of my 10 alarms, all with different tones, to make sure I wake up. This one is Krypton on Android.

Good call on a simulated failure. When I first set it up, it was LVM/BTRFS or ZFS as my top choices. It was a coin toss at the time because I hadn’t built this sort of setup before.

I use immutable nixos installs. Everything to redeploy my OS is tracked in git including most app configurations. The one exception are some GUI apps I’d have to do manually on reinstall.

I have a persistence volume for things like:

• Rollbacks
• Personal files
• Git repos
• Logs
• Caches / Games

I have 30 days (or last 5 minimum) of system rollbacks using BTRFS volumes.

The personal files are backed up hourly to a local server which then backs up nightly to B2 Backblaze using rclone in an encrypted volume using my private keys. The local server has a mishmash of drives in a mirrored LVM setup. While it works well for having mixed drives, I’ll warn I haven’t had a drive failure yet so I’m not sure the difficulty of replacing a drive.

My phone uses the same flow with RoundSync (rclone + GUI).

Git repos are backed up in git.

Logs aren’t backed up. I just persist them for debugging and don’t want them lost after every reboot.

Caches/Games are persisted but not backed up. Nixos uses symlinks and BTRFS to be immutable. That paradigm doesn’t work well for this case. The one exception is a couple game folders are part of my personal files. WoW plugin folder, EvE online layouts, etc.

I used to use Dropbox (with rclone to encrypt). It was $20/mo for 2Tb. It is cheaper on paper. I don’t backup nearly that much. Backblaze started at $1/mo for what I use. I’m now up to $2/mo. It will be a few years before I need to clean up my backups for cost reasons.

The local server is a PC in a case with 8 drive bays plus some NVME drives for fast storage. It has a couple older drives and for the last couple years I typically buy a pair of drives on sale (black Friday, prime day, etc). I have a little over 30TB mirrored, so slightly over 60TB in total. NVME is not counted in that. One NVME is for the system, the others are a caching layer (monero node) or temp storage (transcoding as it also my media server).

I like the case, but if I were to do it again, I’d probably get a rack mountable case.

Peter tingle.

Take the red pill Neo and wake up.

Wakes up to all the injustices in the world.

Noooo Neo, not like that!!!

Could be VRAM which is likely shared with the system’s RAM for an integrated GPU.

I don’t follow Apple’s architecture much and I suppose you’d have to have hardware accelerated transcoding on, so I could be full of shit.

I had similar issues on my NAS before I built a streaming box with a dedicated GPU.

For the networking I found some repos with Nix and Gluetun (OCI containers). I don’t see them in my bookmarks, so it was probably a day project when I set up and didn’t keep the references.

That part is still in docker / podman. So any docker network guide just needs to be translated to nix.

Best resource I’ve found is searching GitHub.

My setup closely follows https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config.

For servarr I just translated someone else’s docker compose setup to nix. There are some ready made nix ones you can look at like https://github.com/rasmus-kirk/nixarr/tree/main/nixarr.

The complex networking I just picked up over time once I knew my way around a little bit.

GitHub is your best resource. lang:nix search terms.

I wouldn’t run NixOS in a container. With native nix containers I’m pretty sure they share the store. For docker I’d use images built with nix (doesn’t run nix itself) or pull from docker hub.

OS: NixOS (high learning curve but its been worth it). Nix (the config language) is a functional programming language, so it can be difficult to grok. Documentation is shit as its evolved while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you use the new stuff (Nix Flakes) you have to figure what’s old and likely not applicable (channels or w/e).

BYOD: Just using LVM. All volumes are mirrored across several drives of different sizes. Some HDD volumes have an SSD cache layer on top (e.g., monero node). Some are just on an SSD (e.g., main system). No drive failures yet so can’t speak to how complex restoring is. All managed through NixOS with https://github.com/nix-community/disko.

I run stuff on a mix of OCI containers (podman or docker, default is podman which is what I use) and native NixOS containers which use systemd-nspawn.

The OS itself I don’t back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don’t backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

I just use rclone for backups with some bash scripts. Devices back up to home lab which backs up to cloud (encrypted with my keys) all using rclone (RoundSync for phone).

Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I’ll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I’m not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

Its pretty low level. Everything is configured in NixOS. No GUIs. If its not configured in nix its wiped next reboot since the OS is immutable. All tracked in git including secrets using SOPS. Every device has its own master key setup on first install. I have a personal master key should I need to reinstall which is tracked outside of git in a password manager.

Took a solid month to get the initial setup done while learning NixOS. I had a very specific setup of LVM > LUKS encryption /w Secure Boot and Hardware Key > BTRFS. Overkill on security but I geek out on that stuff. Been stable but still tinkering with it a year later.

I saw that documentary. “The Wolf of Wall Street” or something? Maybe that was actually late 80s-early 90s.

On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my “back pain”, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.