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Colmena

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A simple, stateless NixOS deployment tool - https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena105 Servers

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9 Mar 2026
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26 Mar 2026
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunone problem i have with colmena is if the deployment is done over vpn (say tailscale), and the update requires tailscale or nftables to restart, the deployment would fail20:57:19
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunmaybe we can change the deployment model a little so that instead of running the switch to configuration directly, we start a transient systemd unit with systemd-run so that the activation keeps going even if the network restarts20:58:36
28 Mar 2026
@elisaado:elisaado.comEli Saado

interesting, I've not noticed this

I know deployrs has this issue too, and they have a feature called magic-rollback, which rolls back to the previous config if it doesn't receive an acknowledgement, which makes it even worse

11:21:30
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sun

i would say this is pretty easy to reproduce

change the deployment config target node ssh host to tailscale address and override that node’s tailscale name or version or smth it should break

11:23:15
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Suni have llm generated slop patch for detached switch to configuration but i dont think it has the quality to be upstreamed 😂11:26:25
@elisaado:elisaado.comEli Saadoand the new config doesn't get applied?11:26:53
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunit errors out11:27:10
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunbecause ssh connection will get terminated and it’s not handled gracefully11:27:33
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunimo the best solution to this would be adding a detached bool flag for deployment config, and a -d/—detached cli flag11:28:47
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunhttps://github.com/stepbrobd/colmena/commit/c5b062e5248ebdfeecf5cb3bf96d4302c278bd3d11:29:33
@elisaado:elisaado.comEli Saadoright, and the rest of the activation script never finishes?11:31:10
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Suni don’t remember the exact behavior but the error log was like ssh 255 and the rest got terminated leaving the system in a intermediate half broken state11:32:46
@elisaado:elisaado.comEli Saado ah that's bad 11:33:20
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Suni usually use boot goal with reboot flag when this happens and that sometimes hangs 😂11:33:41
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Suni figured this is easily solvable by adding tcptimeout and server keep alive time out to smth like 10sec in ssh options but imo it would be better to enable these ssh options by default11:34:46
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunif anyone with more rust knowledge would want to collaborate on this i’d love to get this fixed11:36:23
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunbtw cuda maintainer gaétan and i chatted a while back and he also found that the meta.nixpkgs is only used in colmena internally and you can literally instantiate with any system it’d still work11:37:52
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sunhttps://github.com/GaetanLepage/nix-config/blob/9bc50d15806536b3e8599ed8c176642e337868fd/modules/flake/colmena.nix#L2111:38:25
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sun looks like this is mostly caused by the hermetic guard here: https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena/blob/349b035a5027f23d88eeb3bc41085d7ee29f18ed/src/nix/hive/eval.nix#L89
they are only using it to use lib , get the path to eval-config.nix in nixpkgs (https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena/blob/349b035a5027f23d88eeb3bc41085d7ee29f18ed/src/nix/hive/eval.nix#L122), and reinject overlays and configs (https://github.com/zhaofengli/colmena/blob/349b035a5027f23d88eeb3bc41085d7ee29f18ed/src/nix/hive/eval.nix#L129)
14:30:39
@ysun:beeper.comYifei Sun imo its totally possible this bootstrap is done in colmena (i.e. ask users to only pass in normal nixpkgs without instantiation and set the platform to a constant like x86_64-linux in colmena for bootstrap) so users are less confused lmaooo
or even better, we dont even need bootstrap to get overlays and configs, just create a few more meta knobs and ask users to pass overlays and configs in
14:32:45
@glepage:matrix.orgGaétan Lepage joined the room.14:35:54

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