Does NixOS have a way to PXE many machines via a kickstart or preseed equivalent? I’m curious to experiment with it in the context of a University environment and we use either Cobbler or Foreman for host provisioning.

Also curious what the best practice is for config management. I only know enough to know there’s a nix config file that declares everything. Does this completely supplant puppet/salt/ansible, or do you use them together?

Thanks for any tips!

  • @manos_de_papel
    3•3 months ago

    You can read a bit about PXE boot here https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Netboot

    I would no longer use chef/ansible/puppet/etc if switching to nix.

    Best practices are use git and commit when things work. Write modules. Organize around service first, machine purpose second.

    • @GnomeComedy@beehaw.orgOP
      1•3 months ago

      What’s still not obvious to me is the remote management of the nix config on 500 machines. Without a config management system like Ansible, how to you push a change to those systems?

      • @manos_de_papel
        2•3 months ago

        You can use one of many deployment tools such as deploy-rs, nixops, colmena, morph.

        Or you can configure the systems to pull their config from a bit forge.