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Overengineering my personal infrastructure with NixOS#

CfgMgmtCamp Ghent 2026 digest Program Adjacent pick 2–4 February 2026

Abstract

Lander Van den Bulcke, Open Source consultant at Inuits

  • Why: Homelab-scale, but the networking content is real: WireGuard and GENEVE tunnels, Bird BGP peering into DN42, and fully declarative config for it all. DN42 is one of the few places to run experimental BGP outside production, and this is a worked example of the whole stack under Nix.
  • What: A tour of a personal NixOS infrastructure: remote hypervisor install (nixos-anywhere), SSH-based remote disk unlock in initrd, impermanence with ephemeral root, VM management via microvm.nix, tunnel and BGP setup, and automated nameserver/Prometheus configuration (from abstract only).
  • How: Everything as Nix declarations — microvm.nix for VMs, declarative WireGuard/GENEVE tunnels, Bird configured for DN42 peering, with monitoring automated end to end.
  • Where applicable: Personal/lab scale — the ideas (impermanence, declarative tunnel/BGP config, nixos-anywhere provisioning) transfer to production NixOS estates, and DN42 itself is a general-purpose BGP playground anyone can join. Not a production case study; treat as techniques, not results.