Nixos

Simple one-liner to avoid re-downloading inputs on a different machine on your LAN

A simple guide to setting up private services on NixOS using Tailscale and Caddy with authentication.

NixOS has a module option in systemd-boot that automatically configures boot entries for Windows without requiring me to copy over the EFI folder [ref]

You can run systemctl show servicename.service to get the “final” version of your systemd service file, including all overrides which would typically be loaded dynamically by systemd itself and not visible in the actual unit file. This is extremely helpful on NixOS where packages can sometimes re-use upstream systemd unit files and inject NixOS specific options through an override file.

After a GNOME related NixOS rebuild sometimes the secret store starts erroring out with this message: No such secret item at path: /org/freedesktop/secrets/collection/login/145 This is resolved by restarting the gnome-keyring-daemon using the command gnome-keyring-daemon -r -d.

Found this awesome reference for the NixOS module system: https://nix.dev/tutorials/module-system/index.html

Systemd runs all units that specify Type=oneshot to completion in a blocking manner which is what causes my NixOS configuration switching to sometimes get stuck with a long-running task. The solution is to use Type=simple and instead configure the restart policy to not fire unnecessarily.

Tailscale on NixOS requires setting services.tailscale.useRoutingFeatures = "client" on the non-exit-node machines to allow routing to work.

Running log of random things I’ve learned about Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs