and I want to find a way to streamline the process of adding new nodes to my NixOS network. im looking into the idea of custom ISOs right now, which would allow me to live USB boot onto a computer with things like master computer's SSH keys added, flakes/git/vim enabled, etc.

But this again only takes me halfway there, since even if I get to a stage where colmena/deploy-rs CAN interact with the target host over SSH correctly, the nixosConfiguration will be invalid due to things like fileSystems."/" being unset (which is usually handled by hardware-configuration.nix)

does anyone have any pointers/tips they can share with how to make this easier?

  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (self: super: {
      colmena = super.colmena.overrideAttrs (old: rec {
        patches = [ ];
        src = super.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "zhaofengli";
          repo = "colmena";
          rev = "5e0fbc4dbc50b3a38ecdbcb8d0a5bbe12e3f9a72";
          hash = "sha256-vwu354kJ2fjK1StYmsi/M2vGQ2s72m+t9pIPHImt1Xw=";
        };
        cargoDeps = self.rustPlatform.fetchCargoVendor {
          inherit src;
          hash = "sha256-v5vv66x+QiDhSa3iJ3Kf7PC8ZmK1GG8QdVD2a1L0r6M=";
        };
      });
    })
  ];

nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (self: super: {
      colmena = super.colmena.overrideAttrs (old: rec {
        patches = [ ];
        src = super.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "zhaofengli";
          repo = "colmena";
          rev = "5e0fbc4dbc50b3a38ecdbcb8d0a5bbe12e3f9a72";
          hash = "sha256-vwu354kJ2fjK1StYmsi/M2vGQ2s72m+t9pIPHImt1Xw=";
        };
        cargoDeps = self.rustPlatform.fetchCargoVendor {
          inherit src;
          hash = "sha256-v5vv66x+QiDhSa3iJ3Kf7PC8ZmK1GG8QdVD2a1L0r6M=";
        };
      });
    })
  ];