Three connected changes, all triggered by the same outage.
base_domain leaves mgaction.town. That zone has a wildcard A+AAAA pointing
at neptun, and DNS wildcards match multi-label names, so
jupiter.hosts.mgaction.town resolved publicly to NEPTUN and Caddy proxied
to itself -- a silent loop rather than a lookup failure. Nesting the
tailnet inside the LAN domain as orbit.sol keeps the theme and resolves
unambiguously, since tailscale matches routes by longest suffix.
override_local_dns = true with pihole as the only global nameserver, so
roaming devices get ad blocking and .sol names off-LAN. With it false,
globalResolvers land in the netmap's FallbackResolvers, which a phone
with carrier DNS never consults. No public fallback is listed on purpose:
tailscale treats the list as a set, so a second entry would let queries
slip past the filter whenever mercury is slow. The cost is that mercury
is now a single point of failure for tailnet DNS.
neptun and mercury opt out individually. mercury would otherwise resolve
through itself. neptun must not depend on a Pi behind a domestic line to
renew the certificates for the control server every other node needs --
and it is circular besides, since tailscaled has to resolve
vpn.mgaction.town to connect at all. Instead neptun runs a dnsmasq stub
forwarding just orbit.sol to MagicDNS on 100.100.100.100, which tailscaled
answers whenever it is running regardless of --accept-dns. That resolves
jupiter live, so the hardcoded /etc/hosts pin is gone.
Also sets dns.nameservers.split explicitly: nixpkgs renders its own
dns.split option one level too high, but headscale reads
dns.nameservers.split (hscontrol/types/config.go:722) and so does
headplane, whose DNS page dies on the missing key with "Cannot convert
undefined or null to object". The module's option is dead as written.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
FTL could not write gravity.db, reporting "attempt to write a readonly
database". The database file was writable; the directory was not. sqlite
creates a sibling gravity.db-journal for every write transaction, so FTL
needs to CREATE files in /var/lib/pihole, and the tmpfiles rule left it
root-owned. The error names the database rather than the directory, which
sends you looking at the file and the filesystem, neither of which is at
fault.
Own the directory as 1000 instead -- the pihole user FTL drops to after
the entrypoint's root phase. Podman is rootful here with no userns
remapping, so the number is the same inside and out; on the host it
collides with darman, harmlessly.
The blocklists are now declared in this module and seeded by a oneshot,
because /var/lib/pihole is not declarative and a reflash took gravity
with it. INSERT OR IGNORE keyed on the URL is idempotent so it can run on
every boot, while the expensive rebuild only runs when gravity is empty.
Adding a list to the Nix attribute needs a manual `pihole -g` -- that is
deliberate, since the rebuild downloads every list and is slow on a Pi.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The jupiter /etc/hosts pin step is gone: headscale no longer overrides
clients' local DNS, so MagicDNS resolves that name properly and the
hardcoded tailnet address is no longer needed.
Replaces it with the headscale OIDC application, including the warning
that discovery failure at startup is fatal, and that OIDC users cannot be
reconciled with CLI-created ones -- 0.28 dropped both map_legacy_users
and node reassignment, so switching a node's owner means re-enrolling it.
Documents the Authentik admin swap: superuser is a group flag, and
akadmin must be deactivated rather than renamed or deleted, since the
bootstrap blueprint keys on the username and recreates it otherwise.
For mercury, records that a reflash wipes the gravity database along with
the adlists -- resolution keeps working with nothing blocked, which is
easy to miss -- and that .sol not resolving on mercury itself is by
design, while it resolving on tailnet members depends on
override_local_dns staying false.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything here is something the flake cannot do for you, and all of it
was learned by hitting it: a host that builds and boots cleanly is not
necessarily a host that works.
The sudo check applies to every host and is the one that cost the most.
mutableUsers is true, so /etc/shadow is written once at user creation --
if the sops secret wasn't readable at that moment the account is locked
forever and no rebuild will fix it. That happened twice, and recovery was
netcup's rescue system for neptun and pulling the SD card for mercury.
neptun's netcup firewall is stateless and denies inbound UDP by default,
which drops every DNS and NTP reply while reporting nothing anywhere.
Also covers the Authentik/headscale/headplane bootstrap, which is a
chain of manual steps producing values the config needs.
jupiter gets the tailscaled stale-state trap: after the headscale
database is recreated the daemon still reports Running, and the
autoconnect unit exits early without sending the new pre-auth key.
mercury gets the SD-card failure mode, since silent flash corruption
surfaces as SIGILL from random binaries with a clean dmesg.
Also drops a stray code fence that had been dangling at EOF.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
nixpkgs only carries Zitadel 2.71, which predates the login-v2 split and
cannot take a v3/v4 database (its migrations are forward-only), so the
instance running on the old Debian VPS could never have moved onto it.
authentik-nix ships 2026.5.4 and tracks upstream closely.
The authentik-nix input deliberately does not follow our nixpkgs, per
upstream's warning that overriding it breaks their pinned python
dependency set. That costs a second nixpkgs in the lock, so add
nix-community's Cachix to common.nix -- without it the closure is ~400
local derivations (npm, rust, python). The laptop that runs
scripts/deploy needs the same two lines in /etc/nix/nix.custom.conf.
Authentik's own module creates the database and orders its units against
postgresql.target, and recent versions need no redis, so the wiring is
just the module plus a secret. Pin postgresql explicitly so that editing
system.stateVersion can never silently demand a pg_upgrade of the
identity store.
Secret ownership is not uniform and the difference matters: authentik
and caddy take a systemd EnvironmentFile, which PID 1 reads as root
before dropping privileges, so root:root 0400 is correct. Headplane
opens its secret paths itself while already running as the headscale
user, so those three need an explicit owner or they fail to start.
Also on neptun:
- Pass Caddy's ACME account email through the same EnvironmentFile
mechanism and reference it with the Caddyfile {$VAR} placeholder.
services.caddy.email would render the address into the world-readable
store.
- Stop accepting MagicDNS from our own control server. headscale pushes
override_local_dns, so joining the tailnet would point neptun's
resolv.conf at a MagicDNS served by the tailscaled neptun itself hosts
-- a tailscaled failure would then also take out DNS, ACME renewal and
finally the certs for the control server every other node needs in
order to recover.
- Give headplane a writable DNS extra-records file. Its view of
headscale's config stays read-only, which is the right outcome for a
declarative box; records are data rather than config.
- Require a password for sudo. Deploys become interactive, but darman's
key is otherwise the only thing between the public internet and root.
- Enable zram (8 GB, and disko leaves no room for a swap device), and let
tailscaled-autoconnect retry instead of failing permanently when the
control server isn't up yet on a first boot.
networking.hosts still carries a PLACEHOLDER address for jupiter --
replace it from `headscale nodes list` once jupiter first enrols.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- add disko input; jupiter partitions/formats OS disk declaratively
- hardware-configuration.nix carries kernel modules only (disko owns fileSystems)
- data disk stays a plain unformatted mount, out of disko
- vbox unchanged (virtualbox-image supplies its own disk)
- README: nixos-anywhere remote install + daily rebuild loop
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
darmanandClaude Opus 4.8