Hey y’all, I know getting a setup that feels “right” can be a process. We all have different goals, tech preferences, etc.
I wanted to a share my blog post walking through how I finally built a setup that I can just be happy with and use. It goes over my goals, requirements, tech choices, layout, and some specific problems I’ve resolved.
Where I’ve landed of course isn’t where everyone else will, but I hope it can serve as a good reference. I’ve really benefited from the content and software folks have freely shared, and hope I can continue that and help others.
Happy to answer questions!
this is great! i was intrigued by nix and nixOS early into my linux venture and this has probably pushed me to start moving my stuff from Debian, though i am kinda addicted to proxmox.
but the way you’re doing truenas is how I’m running my stuff too. way more planning on your end really cleans it all up!
I really do encourage experimenting more with NixOS. It’s the strange combination of feeling safer (because of the rollbacks) and more powerful (because of all the modules and packages already setup by the community)
I also spent a while using Proxmox. Almost went with it over TrueNAS. It was a little bit of a tossup, one is a good VM manager with ZFS support and the other good ZFS manger with VM support. I ended up just liking the interface better for TrueNAS, but both are certainly capable
Nice writeup and a fun read! Never thought I would encounter a fellow NixOS and FoundryVTT user in the wild, but I realize the Venn diagram of these kinds of users do have more overlap than I thought.
With regards to your point about Foundry needing more power than a cheap VPS: I have it working fine on an Oracle cloud free tier VPS (unfortunately not the ARM-cores). That being said, it does want a little more power.
I am not running it with NixOS though. I am renting a temporary space, so I do not own or want to do too much locally right now, and Oracle OCI was only sort of working with NixOS. I did manage to install it with nixos-infect, but think I messed up the SSH with my reverse proxy and had no way to fall back to a previous version, which begs the question how would you?
You linked to “NixOS friendly hosters”, do those give you access to boot options to recover from such a case? Since I did not have that option I determined the risk of failure too great for setting up NixOS on that particular VPS provider.
I also note that you use the nix-foundryvtt module and was wondering how your experience with it was. Does your sops define your login to the website such that it fetches the package automatically or do you have to manually install them?
What’s your hardware setup for all of this? I’ve got an 8 core, 16 GB, 5TB external NUC but it starts struggling after I add a few services. BitWarden in particular so I just used their services instead. I’d love to run everything myself for same reasons but I def might need an upgrade first.
I’m using a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 64GB of RAM for my main server. Looking at it right now (so just light background activity) the services are using ~3% of my CPU and 10GB of memory. Granted my ZFS cache is using 32GB of memory, I could tune that to use less, but I have enough headroom to make that fine
I opted to just use the Bitwarden service to avoid depending on my services to get my secrets for my services, so I haven’t tried running it, but I have heard good things about Vaultwarden. I’ll eventually try running that as a backup