Q: How many men does it take to run NixOS? A: We have to contact their ancestors and start from when earth was formed.

Jokes aside, I’m trying to move my self-hosted setup to NixOS. The context being, when I moved from one place to another and wanted to set some software in a new computer – it’s very hard to replicate the old setup even with notes.

This time, I want to run everything with Nix so when I’m switching places again it’s easier to get up and running again.

I’ve hit a small problem.

My wife wants me to get it running ASAP to offload some of her phone’s storage. Even I can’t update my phone’s software until I free up some storage.

So I can’t wait until I can set everything up with NixOS.

Here’s an example, in an ordinary linux computer if you want version 1 of software A, and version 3 of software B you can install them separately yes?

But nixpkgs freezes versions of its components. So you have to take whatever versions of software A, B is baked into that nixpkgs release? Or have I understood it wrong?

To cope with the delay, I setup a VirtualBox inside a debian system to run NixOS and come up with a good configuration.nix (the config which declares your system). But

• There were some issues with the networking bridge and NixOS failing to register itself with the router.
• When I installed tailscale, apparently there were some conflicts with how tailscale and nix wanted to configure iptables.

It was just too much time being wasted on setting up.

So, I deleted VirtualBox and I’ll configure that computer the old-fashioned way, like a caveman.

Very happily, I came across nixos-infect which converts major linux installations into NixOS. I’m using my OCI free tier to have a system that I can play around with – once I have a good configuration.nix, I’ll bring that bad-boy to my homeserver.