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jackos1998 0aade09d7e nixos/portcullis: Add initial config

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>

2026-08-19 01:30:59 +01:00

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portcullis

A bare-metal box destined for Nikhef, intended to take over most of the colony edge routing currently done by the estuary VM.

Source: nixos/boxes/colony/portcullis/
Host: bare metal
nixpkgs: mine-stable

Hardware

Component	Inventory
Platform	Mini PC (no vendor DMI strings)
CPU	Intel N150 (4 cores / 4 threads)
Memory	8 GiB
Storage	One 128 GB NVMe SSD (`nvme0n1`), partitioned as a 2 GiB ESP plus an LVM PV holding the `nix` and `persist` volumes
Network	Four Intel I226-V 2.5 GbE ports (`et2g5-0`…`et2g5-3`) and one dual-port Intel 82599ES 10 GbE SFP+ card (`et10g-0`, `et10g-1`)
Management	JetKVM (HDMI/USB KVM with virtual media)

Role

Not yet in service. The eventual job is to be the physical edge for the colony site at Nikhef, taking over most of what estuary does today — WAN termination, firewalling and NAT, BGP for AS211024 and DNS. Some of that functionality stays on estuary, and the surrounding network topology will change with the move, so the split is not settled yet. Until it is, the config in this repository covers only what is needed to boot and reach the box.

Network assignments

portcullis has no static assignments yet. It is being staged at home before it is racked, so it takes DHCP on the home lo VLAN; the colony assignments land alongside the routing config once the topology is decided.

Networking

The four I226-V ports are named et2g5-0…et2g5-3 and the 82599ES SFP+ ports et10g-0 / et10g-1, pinned by permanent MAC address in .link files.
Bootstrap only: a single .network matches every et2g5-* port and takes DHCP, so whichever port happens to be patched in brings the box up. wait-online.anyInterface keeps boot from blocking on the unpatched ports.
kea registers the DHCP hostname, so while staged the box answers to portcullis.dyn.h.nul.ie — which is also what my.deploy.node.hostname points at, since there is no colony FQDN for it yet.

Storage

A single NVMe SSD, following the usual tmpfs-root layout: a 2 GiB ESP at /boot, then one LVM PV in volume group main carrying portcullis-nix (48 GiB, /nix) and portcullis-persist (the remainder, /persist).

Secrets

my.secrets.key is the SSH host key adopted from the installer session at install time (seeded onto the persist volume before first boot), so secrets could be encrypted for the box without waiting for it to come up. The box declares nothing of its own yet — only the default user-passwd.txt that my.user brings in.

Notable config files

nixos/boxes/colony/portcullis/default.nix — hardware, filesystems and bootstrap networking.

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