| 22 Nov 2024 |
 K900 | As I said, there is no easy way to get the size reduction you want | 10:19:21 |
| K900 | You'll just have to start digging yourself | 10:19:25 |
 magic_rb | In reply to @khartahk:matrix.org
added that, and updated git repo, removed a couple of MB still at 2.1GB curretnly. I'm testing it using nixos-enter command on a USB drive that I know it boots so I can do it live on 1 computer - really nice and easy to chroot to nixos ... You probably want to start digging with nix-tree and nix-diff trying to identify the big packages attempting to then get rid of them or overriding to make them smaller. Youll have to do a lot of rebuilding though | 11:05:09 |
| magic_rb | And at the end youll end up with something which wont be nixos and barely nixpkgs anymore :) | 11:05:40 |
 khartahk | OK, so would this then be a better route: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1f8150661e78f70bda0b51893344326fc2ca264c/nixos/modules/profiles/image-based-appliance.nix | 11:27:27 |
| K900 | That will not get you much further | 11:28:28 |
| K900 | You'll have to start overriding packages | 11:28:33 |
 Gerd Flaig | Will the HDDs remain in the device? Could just put /boot on the tiny disk and put the rest of the system on a mirror across the HDDs. | 12:00:15 |
| khartahk | I wan't to have the HDDs just for data, so that I don't have issues destroying the OS drive and recreating it on a new hardware. Guess this really looks like something that would degrade the NixOS experience to much if I started to rip out components. I just wish that I could find which "list" of packages in which variable I need to override to remove the unwanted ones - or however this is implemented in nix.
I think I'd need to understand quite some more how nix is built to be able to do this.
Is there a simple way I could set nix to run from memory, where it would unpack from some squasfs compressed file? I think Puppy Linux does this - not sure anymore as it's been a while since I've used it. | 15:56:21 |
| K900 | There is no such list | 15:57:35 |
| K900 | Because there are generally very few "unwanted" packages in the default install | 15:57:57 |
| K900 | What you'll have to do is start modifying packages to remove features you don't want | 15:58:06 |
| khartahk | Guess it's better for me to focus on getting all the feature I want working and just use a bit larger drive. Thanks for all the insights though. | 16:09:31 |
 emily | In reply to @khartahk:matrix.org
It's disk and I want this to be a self sufficient NAS for backups which won't have a network drive available to boot from that. can you not just boot off a USB stick or SD card | 16:11:48 |
| khartahk | That's where I have the issue, the USB 3 ports on the device suddenly stopped working. The hub is visible if I do lsusb but no device is found to be attached. Then I only have 2 USB 2 ports available and the internal USB header which has the QNAP DOM module with 512MB of size. Right now I'm booting the device using a USB with Unraid on it and that work perfectly since Unraid boots to ram and does not use the drive a lot so the USB 2 speeds are not really a problem. And also the OS is quite small. I think arround 500MB or something like that. | 16:33:25 |
| K900 | Are you sure it's not some sort of kernel bug? Have you tried booting NixOS from a USB? | 16:36:45 |
| khartahk | I tried booting the NAS using Ubuntu and there is no USB device found when plugged into the USB 3 ports, then I booted the NAS from a Ubuntu disk attached to SATA ports and connected different devices to the USB 3 port but no device was found. Also looking in the BIOS no USB drive is detected from which I could boot but if I move the drive to USB2 then it's detected and works. And I know the ports worked coz at first I was able to boot from them the same drive that is no lo longer found. | 16:41:59 |
| Gerd Flaig | In reply to @khartahk:matrix.org
I wan't to have the HDDs just for data, so that I don't have issues destroying the OS drive and recreating it on a new hardware. Guess this really looks like something that would degrade the NixOS experience to much if I started to rip out components. I just wish that I could find which "list" of packages in which variable I need to override to remove the unwanted ones - or however this is implemented in nix.
I think I'd need to understand quite some more how nix is built to be able to do this.
Is there a simple way I could set nix to run from memory, where it would unpack from some squasfs compressed file? I think Puppy Linux does this - not sure anymore as it's been a while since I've used it. I'm not sure I understand the bit about issues recreating the OS. You want to be able to pull the drives and put them in a different NAS box? | 16:42:24 |
| khartahk | yes, in case I needed to migrate coz the NAS would die or something and I want data to be decoupled from the OS. | 16:44:10 |
| Gerd Flaig | Having a slice with the OS on the drives doesn't hurt - you can still put the disk into another box to recover the data. Should have backups anyway. ;) | 16:45:13 |
| Gerd Flaig | * Having a slice with the OS on the drives doesn't hurt - you can still put the disks into another box to recover the data. Should have backups anyway. ;) | 16:45:28 |
| Gerd Flaig | Since you mentioned it's a Qnap box - IIRC they're doing exactly like this. That's why they can get away with such a tiny boot device. | 16:46:27 |
| Gerd Flaig | * Since you mentioned it's a Qnap box - IIRC they're doing it exactly like this. That's why they can get away with such a tiny boot device. | 16:46:40 |
| khartahk | That is also true, I just prefer it that way. Probably coz of something I read regarding ZFS and that it need the entire drive etc ... which I know is not true but I kinda just stuck with that as it mitigates the chance of me accidentaly format the wrong drive. Especialy if the OS drive has a totaly different naming schema like nvme or something :) | 16:47:08 |
| Gerd Flaig | Fair :) | 16:47:56 |
| Gerd Flaig | At this time, it seems mostly a trade-off between requirements and time-to-working-solution. | 16:49:01 |
| khartahk | The time I have - it can wait a bit, the problem I think is I try to over-complicate things that I want to simplify. I want to move as much stuff as I can to nix because of it's declarative nature and that way I don't have to have some special backup for the config. Perhaps for this device it's easier and more cost efective to just use Unraid and have the config be backed up in another manner. Coz Unraid does everything I need: boots from usb 2 quite fast, runs in memory and does not use a lot of it so even those 2GB of ram available in here are mostly free for me to deploy some services. | 16:56:00 |
| Gerd Flaig | Side note: Since you mentioned using ZFS, IIRC that can use a lot of memory, especially when enabling deduplication. | 17:00:52 |
 ryantrinkle | Yeah generally deduplication is not recommended unless you are in a very special circumstance | 17:02:05 |
| magic_rb | Zfs without dedup eats memory because of ARC, the solution there is to tel zfs to keep minimum of X GB free, so that other software doesnt think its under constant memory pressure | 17:04:12 |
