Files
nixfiles/docs/boxes/colony/colony.md
T
jackos1998 a7ea91f529 docs: Document the boxes
Add a top-level `README.md` mapping the boxes and per-machine docs under
`docs/boxes/` (grouped `colony/`, `home/`, `misc/`), one file per host, VM and
container documenting role, services and networking with source pointers.

Also point `AGENTS.md` at the new docs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-14 22:45:20 +01:00

1.7 KiB

colony (host)

The physical dedicated server in Amsterdam and the VM host for everything in this group.

Role

Bare-metal AMD host. It does little application work itself — its job is to run the VMs and provide them with storage, networking and backups.

  • Virtualisation: QEMU/KVM (kvm-amd, IOMMU on) via the my.vms module. VM disks are LVM logical volumes (vm-<name>-<disk>) in the main volume group; estuary additionally gets a WAN NIC by PCI passthrough.
  • Storage: LVM-thin (services.lvm.boot.thin), /persist for state, /mnt/backup for the local borg repo. smartd + rasdaemon for health.
  • Backups: my.borgthin snapshots the persist/data LVs of the host and its VMs into /mnt/backup/main, which is then rsync'd (along with LVM metadata) to rsync.net (zh2855.rsync.net).
  • Monitoring: netdata (with freeipmi), smartd.

Networking

  • Two bridges: base (the colony "base" network, shared with estuary) and vms (the VM network). Dummy interfaces keep the bridges up so dependent VMs can start.
  • Default gateway / edge is estuary; colony itself holds the routing and internal (a.k.a. vm) assignments and routes container/OCI/Tailscale prefixes to shill and whale2.
  • my.firewall trusts the vms interface and forwards customer prefixes (vm-mail, vm-darts) through.

VMs hosted here

estuary, shill, whale2, git (all NixOS, documented in this directory), plus the non-NixOS mail and darts (see README).