I had my eyes on some nice arm64 servers from Hetzner, and I finally pulled the trigger, I got the CAX21 .
It is also the opportunity to reduce time of maintaining my infrastructure, I will use NixOS to setup my server. By having a couple of configuration files, it will be easier to review, edit and update the system.
But time will tell if it is the good decision, and not sticking to a imperative distribution such as Debian.
Not a lot of storage
The only downside with these servers is the storage -- I only have 80 gigabytes of storage on mine. Fortunately, Hetzner has their Storage Box offerings, I picked up a BX11 which has 1 terabyte of storage!
The plan is to mount the storage box as a regular drive and have applications use it normally. The main applications will be documents, media, backups -- not speed critical data such as databases or logs.
Storage Box ordering and setup
Start by ordering your Storage Box, I think mine took less than an hour to be provisioned and delivered to me.
On the configuration panel, I only ticked SSH support and the disabled the rest. If you will use the storage box outside of the Hetzner network, enable External reachability .
Finally, you cannot set the password yourself, you will have to reset it.
SSH keys
On the server, generate a new ssh key with ssh-keygen which will be used to connect to the storage box.
Since I want the storage box to be mounted automatically on startup, so I did not set a passphrase on the key.
Copy the ssh to the storage box with:
ssh-copy-id -p 23 -s user@storagebox.example.org
More documentation on ssh keys with storage box: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/backup-space-ssh-keys
NixOS configuration
The easy part, and the reason why I think I will like to use NixOS on my server:
You can put it inside your configuration.nix directly, I placed it inside its own file.
{ ... }:
{
fileSystems."/mnt/storagebox" = {
device = "user@storagebox.example.org:/some/path";
fsType = "fuse.sshfs";
options = [
"identityfile=/place/to/ssh/key/somewhere"
"idmap=user"
"x-systemd.automount" # mount the filesystem automatically on first access
"allow_other" # don't restrict access to only the user which `mount`s it (because that's probably systemd who mounts it, not you)
"user" # allow manual `mount`ing, as ordinary user.
"_netdev"
];
};
boot.supportedFilesystems."fuse.sshfs" = true;
}
Thank you so much to this Discourse post for the configuration snippet!
Run
nixos-rebuild switch && cd /mnt/storagebox
and you are able to read and write files!