Add: homelab: apprentissage à la dure

content/posts/homelab-apprentissage-dur.en.md

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+date = '2025-09-29T20:13:40+02:00'
+draft = false
+tags = [ "nixos", "self-hosting" ]
+title = 'Homelab: Learning the hard way'
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+
+Spending the weekend with family, I took the chance to check whether I could still access my various sites and services from outside. Feeling pretty good after that success, I thought—why not set up rtorrent through ProtonVPN on the server?
+
+## The Beginning of the Screw-ups
+
+Naturally, it wasn’t going to be straightforward. Natively, it’s already messy, but with NixOS? Utter chaos. So I turned to an AI, hoping for some explanations, and started blindly pasting random commands it spit out whenever an error showed up. Of course, nothing ever worked, and even worse, I had no clue what I was actually doing. In situations like that, you can smell disaster coming a mile away.
+
+And sure enough—that’s exactly what happened! Boom, the whole network broke. No more outside access, sites and services down, just the big blank page of doom.
+
+No problem, I thought—let’s just ssh in and fix the mess… except, nope, I had closed my session, and ssh was now dead too. And that was it. Game over for the weekend, I’d have to wait until I got back home.
+
+## NixOS to the Rescue
+
+End of the weekend, I get back home, plug a screen into the server, and hook up a USB keyboard. And here’s where NixOS really shows its magic.
+
+- I reboot into an earlier generation with no issues.
+- I remove rtorrent.nix and another imported file.
+- I rebuild and reboot.
+- Once it comes back up, services are running again. All that’s left is a bit of cleanup in the Git repo.
+
+## Lessons Learned
+
+This whole thing could be a chapter of “self-hosting the hard way.” You always learn best the hard way, don’t you? So, to sum up:
+- Don’t mess with configs on weekends—and absolutely not the networking part.
+- Keep Git up to date so you can roll back easily; it makes git reset a lot simpler.
+- NixOS is insanely useful when it comes to fixing your screw-ups in no time flat.
+
+## Resolutions
+
+Beyond the obvious—stop making critical changes when I don’t have physical access to the machine—I think I’ll set up a method to build NixOS VMs directly from my flake directories, just to test out some configurations. At the very least, I’ll create separate branches for experiments, so I can always rebuild from master if needed. Way simpler in the long run.
+
+In short, NixOS gives you huge flexibility. Might as well take full advantage of it, right?
+