Now upscale it back to the original size using ai

One thing that makes a project good is knowing what it does, I’ve seen quite a few projects where they talk about all the features and technology and how to configure it but not a word about what it actually does, what problems it solves and so on.

I won’t self host your program if you don’t even tell me what it does, don’t make me search and clue together large parts of the documentation just to find if I want it. A simple explanation is enough but somehow I’ve seen quite a few programs that don’t have it.

SystemG ^{sadly doesn’t exist}

The deep lore

The one I forgot, obviously.

More like *screams into the void*

Seems more like “stage drowning” to me.

Yeah it works great and is very secure but every time I create a new service it’s a lot of copy paste boilerplate, maybe I’ll put most of that into a nix function at some point but until then here’s an example n8n config, as loaded from the main nixos file.

I wrote this last night for testing purposes and just added comments, the config works but n8n uses sqlite and probably needs some other stuff that I hadn’t had a chance to use yet so keep that in mind.
Podman support in home-manager is also really new and doesn’t support pods (multiple containers, one loopback) and some other stuff yet, most of it can be compensated with the extraarguments but before this existed I used pure file definitions to write quadlet/systemd configs which was even more boilerplate but also mostly copypasta.

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:

{
    users.users.n8n = {
        # calculate sub{u,g}id using uid
        subUidRanges = [{
            startUid = 100000+65536*( config.users.users.n8n.uid - 999);
            count = 65536;
        }];
        subGidRanges = [{
            startGid = 100000+65536*( config.users.users.n8n.uid - 999);
            count = 65536;
        }];
        isNormalUser = true;
        linger = true; # start user services on system start, fist time start after `nixos-switch` still has to be done manually for some reason though
        openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = config.users.users.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys; # allows the ssh keys that can login as root to login as this user too
    };
    home-manager.users.n8n = { pkgs, ... }:
    let
        dir = config.users.users.n8n.home;
        data-dir = "${dir}/${config.users.users.n8n.name}-data"; # defines the path "/home/n8n/n8n-data" using evaluated home paths, could probably remove a lot of redundant n8n definitions....
    in
    {
        home.stateVersion = "24.11";
        systemd.user.tmpfiles.rules =
        let
            folders = [
                "${data-dir}"
                #"${data-dir}/data-volume-name-one" 
            ];
            formated_folders = map (folder: "d ${folder} - - - -") folders; # a function that takes a path string and formats it for systemd tmpfiles such that they get created as folders
        in formated_folders;

        services.podman = {
            enable = true;
            containers = {
                n8n-app = { # define a container, service name is "podman-n8n-app.service" in case you need to make multiple containers depend and run after each other
                    image = "docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n";
                    ports = [
                        "${config.local.users.users.n8n.listenIp}:${toString config.local.users.users.n8n.listenPort}:5678" # I'm using a self defined option to keep track of all ports and uids in a seperate file, these values just map to "127.0.0.1:30023:5678", a caddy does a reverse proxy there with the same option as the port.
                    ];
                    volumes = [
                        "${data-dir}:/home/node/.n8n" # the folder we created above
                    ];
                    userNS = "keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000"; # n8n stores files as non-root inside the container so they end up as some high uid outside and the user which runs these containers can't read it because of that. This maps the user 1000 inside the container to the uid of the user that's running podman. Takes a lot of time to generate the podman image for a first run though so make sure systemd doesn't time out
                    environment = {
                        # MYHORSE = "amazing";
                    };
                    # there's also an environmentfile option for secret management, which works with sops if you set the owner of the secret/secret template
                    extraPodmanArgs = [
                        "--pull=newer" # always pull newer images when starting, I could make this declaritive but I haven't found a good way to automagically update the container hashes in my nix config at the push of a button.
                    ];
                 # few more options exist that I didn't need here
                };
            };
        };
    };
}

DNS turns a domain name into an IP which can then be used to send data through your router, a dns server is the server which is used to do this conversion (www.google.com turns into an IP 1.2.3.4 (that isn’t the actual IP of google)).

There are many dns servers, normally your local devices use your router as the dns server, which forwards it to your ISP which they further transfer it over global dns servers.

Alternatively you could use Google’s DNS server (8.8.8.8) or cloudflares DNS server (1.1.1.1) but if the one on your router works then just use it.

nameserver is the same as DNS server

Tldr: set the router IP as your dns server, you only need this one.

…that’s the valid response, does ping www.google.com work and curl www.google.com return a bunch of text?

If ping www.google.com doesn’t work then your system isn’t using the correct dns server, though your local dns server works (as seen by the prior dig).

If curl works then…you have a working internet connection, maybe check the browser settings for proxy or something.

That seems correct, don’t change anything in there, try the command dig @<routerip> www.google.com or nslookup www.google.com <router ip> if the dig command is not found.

I use podman using home-manager configs, I could run the services natively but currently I have a user for each service that runs the podman containers. This way each service is securely isolated from each other and the rest of the system. Maybe if/when NixOS supports good selinux rules I’ll switch back to running it native.

Hey now, you can also spend 20 pages of documentation and 10 pages of blogs/forums/github¹ and you can implement a whole nix module such that you only need to write a further 3 lines to activate the service.

1 Your brain can have a little source code, as a threat.

No one can ping 4.4.4.4, it doesn’t answer pings.

This seems like a dns issue, check cat /etc/resolv.conf and try setting the dns server in Networkmanager to “8.8.8.8”.

Gluster is EOL is my biggest takeaway.

“We”? Who’s “we”? There is no “we”.

Did he stutter?

NVK seems to be moving way faster than I expected.

The truth hurts.