New bare-metal box headed for Nikhef, intended to take over most of estuary's colony edge routing. This is the bootstrap config only: the hardware, the single-NVMe ESP + LVM layout, and enough networking to boot and be reachable. It is being staged at home before it is racked, so it has no colony assignments yet. Every 2.5G port takes DHCP and whichever one is patched in brings the box up; kea registers the DHCP hostname, so the deploy node points at portcullis.dyn.h.nul.ie until there is a real colony FQDN for it. The host key was adopted from the installer session and seeded onto the persist volume before first boot, so my.secrets.key could be set up front -- which makes portcullis a recipient of the user-passwd secret that my.user declares for every box. Documented with a box page, a row in the colony site index, and a note in the colony section of networking.md that the topology is expected to change once portcullis takes over from estuary. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deployment documentation
Note: these pages are a work in progress and were agent-generated from the repository. They may be incomplete or out of date — treat the Nix configuration as the source of truth.
This directory documents the boxes managed by this flake: their roles, network assignments,
hierarchy, and the services they run. For the mechanics of the repo itself (conventions, module
system internals for contributors, agent guidance), see AGENTS.md.
The two big sites follow the pattern:
physical host (VM host)
└── VM (for things impractical to containerise)
└── container host VM
└── NixOS containers (one per application group)
Not every box fits this pattern, but colony and home are organised this way.
General
architecture.md— the custom module system,my.*namespace, multiple nixpkgs channels, shared module inventory.networking.md— network assignments, domains, site topologies, router HA, the AS211024 L2 mesh, BGP, WireGuard, Tailscale.deployment.md— deploy-rs, devshell commands, secrets workflow, CI.nixpkgs-upgrade.md— guided procedure for the periodic upgrade of the four nixpkgs channels and home-manager (fork rebase, stable bumps, input review).reference/dns.md— generated forward and reverse DNS record reference.reference/nixos-options.md— generated per-option reference for the custommy.*NixOS modules.
Site: colony (Amsterdam)
Physical host and public-infrastructure hub — see sites/colony/README.md.
colony (physical VM host, ams1)
├── estuary ── edge router: WAN, firewall/NAT, DNS, BGP (AS211024), WireGuard
├── shill ──── NixOS container host ──┬── middleman (reverse proxy, ACME, nginx-sso, librespeed)
│ ├── vaultwarden (password manager)
│ ├── colony-psql (shared PostgreSQL)
│ ├── chatterbox (Matrix Synapse + bridges)
│ ├── jackflix (media stack)
│ ├── object (MinIO, Harmonia Nix cache, Sharry, HedgeDoc, wastebin)
│ ├── toot (Bluesky PDS; Mastodon disabled)
│ ├── waffletail (Tailscale subnet router / exit node)
│ ├── qclk (WireGuard management appliance)
│ ├── gam (Terraria server)
│ └── jam (raw nspawn customer container)
├── whale2 ─── podman/OCI host for game servers
├── git ────── Gitea + Gitea Actions runner
├── mail ───── Debian VM running mailcow (not NixOS)
└── darts ──── third-party/customer VM (opaque, not NixOS)
portcullis (bare-metal edge box for Nikhef — staged, not yet in service)
Site: home
Redundant routers, VM host, storage, IoT containers and the workstation — see
sites/home/README.md. The hand-configured switch fabric (jim/dave/brian)
and the Digiweb WAN path are documented in sites/home/switches.md; the
5G modem being evaluated as a replacement for stream's WAN is in
sites/home/wwan.md.
h.nul.ie
├── palace (physical VM host — AMD, 100G, SR-IOV)
│ ├── river ── primary router VM (PPPoE / Digiweb WAN)
│ ├── cellar ─ NVMe-oF / SPDK storage target VM
│ └── sfh ──── container host VM ("shill from home")
│ ├── hass ── Home Assistant + Frigate + MQTT (container)
│ └── unifi ─ UniFi controller (container)
├── stream (physical secondary router — Virgin Media WAN)
└── castle (workstation / gaming desktop — netboot, NVMe-oF root)
Remote boxes
The edge VPSes and remote kelder site are indexed in remote/README.md.
Mobile boxes
The laptop is indexed in mobile/README.md.
Misc
misc/installer.md— the custom NixOS installer image.
A note on the assignment tables
The consolidated Box assignments tables in
networking.md (one per site, between <!-- assignments: <site> --> markers)
are generated from the flake (nixos.allAssignments) by nix run .#update-docs-assignments —
CI refreshes them on push. Individual box pages link to that section rather than carrying their
own table. Only the Notes column is hand-written; don't hand-edit the other cells.