Booting old NixOS

My between-the-years project was trying to use my old Thinkpad to run some local services, for example MPD. I thought, that the Thinkpad did not even have a drive anymore, and was surprised to find a 256GB SSD inside of it – with nixos still installed!

AND RUNNING!

So, after almost two years, I booted my old Thinkpad, entered the crypto password for the harddrive, and got greeted with a login screen and an i3 instance. Firefox asked whether I want to start the old session again... everything just worked.

I was amazed.

Well, this is not the crazy thing I wanted to write about here. The problem now was: I update and deploy my devices using krops nowadays. This old installation had root login disabled, which is required for krops to work...

But, because nixos is awesome,... I did nothing more than checking out the git commit the latest generation on the Thinkpad was booted from, modified some settings for ssh server and root user ... rebuild the system and switched to the new build... and then started deployment for the new nixos 20.09 installation using krops.

All without hassle. I might run out of disk space now, because this deployes a full KDE Plasma 5 installation, but honestly it would surprise me... there should be enough space. I am curious, though, whether KDE Plasma 5 runs on the device. We'll see...

tags: #nixos #desktop