Open Source is a Gift. But a gift that comes with strings attached is a shitty one.

The PiBox is a small personal server powered by a Raspberry Pi CM4. It comes in a nice enclosure which has a fan, an LCD screen, and has two bays for SATA SSDs. KubeSail, the company behind it, offers backup storage and proxy traffic as a service. They also support a bunch of templates for easily self hosting apps like Jellyfin or NextCloud.

But, since I'm already very comfortable with NixOS and deploy a bunch of custom workloads with it, I wanted to try using it instead of the OS that ships with the PiBox.

Here's how I went about it, and how you can too!

Suppose we have control of our own domain and a set of services we want to share with (only) our friends and family. Here's how we can make them accessible over both Tailscale or when connected to the same physical network while using the exact same domain in each case.

A year ago I found myself with some free time around the holidays which was the perfect opportunity for tinkering with Nix and cargo. What started out as a weekend learning project shaped up so nicely that I decided to share it with the world, and here we are a year later.

I live my life dangerously. And by that I mean I like to run unstable versions of various software that I use daily and prefer to work as I expect them. Sometimes a change will land and break my workflow, though Nix makes this tolerable since I can always switch back to an older version of my configuration.

Except sometimes the breakage isn't due to a bug but an intentional change in upstream defaults, and in those cases the solution is to update my configs appropriately. The hard part is figuring out how and why they broke especially since I don't always pay close attention to every change landing upstream.

Here's how I used Nix to find out what broke my workflow.