Files
nixfiles/docs/sites/colony
jackos1998 bf411e03e2 nixos/portcullis: Tune NICs, IOMMU and EEE
Router-sized 4096-entry rings on every port with GRO kept across
forwarding, the IOMMU in passthrough mode, and EEE pinned off on the
I226-V ports as one trigger for their link-drop erratum. The ring and
GRO settings are .link files, so they land on a device add event rather
than at switch time.

Also document the tuning deliberately not done -- coalescing and PCIe
ASPM -- and what measuring the NICs' ESP offload found, since the
esp4_offload modules are software batching and easy to mistake for it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-23 10:54:22 +01:00
..
2026-08-02 00:12:57 +01:00
2026-08-02 00:12:57 +01:00
2026-08-02 01:07:27 +01:00
2026-08-02 00:12:57 +01:00
2026-08-02 00:12:57 +01:00
2026-08-02 00:12:57 +01:00

colony

The hosted dedicated server in Amsterdam (ams1) and the public-facing half of the boxes: almost everything reachable from the internet lives here.

  • Internal domain: ams1.int.nul.ie (lib.my.c.colony.domain)
  • Public domain: nul.ie — public services are published as *.nul.ie
  • Source: nixos/boxes/colony/

Networking

colony separates the host, VMs, shill containers and whale2 OCI workloads onto dedicated networks behind estuary, which terminates the public addressing. The canonical prefixes and routing overview are in the colony section of networking.md.

Boxes

Box Role
colony Physical VM host (AMD, KVM, LVM-thin, borgthin backups → rsync.net)
estuary Edge router: WAN, firewall/NAT, DNS, BGP (AS211024), WireGuard
shill NixOS container host (most applications; per-container pages under shill/)
whale2 podman/OCI game-server host
git Gitea + Gitea Actions runner
mail Debian VM running mailcow (not NixOS)
darts Third-party/customer VM (not NixOS)
portcullis Bare-metal edge box for Nikhef; being staged, not yet in service

The applications running on shill are listed on its own page — see shill/README.md.

mail and darts are host-defined VMs whose guest operating systems are managed out of band; their pages document only what this repository controls.

portcullis is new hardware headed for Nikhef that will take over most of estuary's edge routing. It is not deployed yet and the resulting topology is still being worked out. It travels with fergal, an OpenWrt SFP+ switch whose firmware this flake builds; both are staged at home for now, borrowing the home fabric through jim.