Running Guix on a Linode Server (GNU Guix Cookbook)

To run Guix on a server hosted by Linode, start with a recommended Debian server. We recommend using the default distro as a way to bootstrap Guix. Create your SSH keys.

Be sure to add your SSH key for easy login to the remote server. This is trivially done via Linode’s graphical interface for adding SSH keys. Go to your profile and click add SSH Key. Copy into it the output of:

In the Linode’s Storage tab, resize the Debian disk to be smaller. 30 GB free space is recommended. Then click "Add a disk", and fill out the form with the following:

In the Configurations tab, press "Edit" on the default Debian profile. Under "Block Device Assignment" click "Add a Device". It should be /dev/sdc and you can select the "Guix" disk. Save Changes.

Now power it back up, booting with the Debian configuration. Once it’s running, ssh to your server via

ssh
root@<your-server-IP-here>

. (You can find your server IP address in your Linode Summary section.) Now you can run the "install guix from see Binary Installation in GNU Guix" steps:

sudo apt-get install gpg
wget https://sv.gnu.org/people/viewgpg.php?user_id=15145 -qO - | gpg --import -
wget https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/plain/etc/guix-install.sh
chmod +x guix-install.sh
./guix-install.sh
guix pull

Now it’s time to write out a config for the server. The key information is below. Save the resulting file as guix-config.scm.

(use-modules (gnu)
             (guix modules))
(use-service-modules networking
                     ssh)
(use-package-modules admin
                     certs
                     package-management
                     ssh
                     tls)

(operating-system
  (host-name "my-server")
  (timezone "America/New_York")
  (locale "en_US.UTF-8")
  ;; This goofy code will generate the grub.cfg
  ;; without installing the grub bootloader on disk.
  (bootloader (bootloader-configuration
               (bootloader
                (bootloader
                 (inherit grub-bootloader)
                 (installer #~(const #true))))))
  (file-systems (cons (file-system
                        (device "/dev/sda")
                        (mount-point "/")
                        (type "ext4"))
                      %base-file-systems))


  (swap-devices (list "/dev/sdb"))


  (initrd-modules (cons "virtio_scsi"    ; Needed to find the disk
                        %base-initrd-modules))

  (users (cons (user-account
                (name "janedoe")
                (group "users")
                ;; Adding the account to the "wheel" group
                ;; makes it a sudoer.
                (supplementary-groups '("wheel"))
                (home-directory "/home/janedoe"))
               %base-user-accounts))

  (packages (cons* nss-certs            ;for HTTPS access
                   openssh-sans-x
                   %base-packages))

  (services (cons*
             (service dhcp-client-service-type)
             (service openssh-service-type
                      (openssh-configuration
                       (openssh openssh-sans-x)
                       (password-authentication? #false)
                       (authorized-keys
                        `(("janedoe" ,(local-file "janedoe_rsa.pub"))
                          ("root" ,(local-file "janedoe_rsa.pub"))))))
             %base-services)))

(host-name "my-server")       ; replace with your server name
; if you chose a linode server outside the U.S., then
; use tzselect to find a correct timezone string
(timezone "America/New_York") ; if needed replace timezone
(name "janedoe")              ; replace with your username
("janedoe" ,(local-file "janedoe_rsa.pub")) ; replace with your ssh key
("root" ,(local-file "janedoe_rsa.pub")) ; replace with your ssh key

The last line in the above example lets you log into the server as root and set the initial root password (see the note at the end of this recipe about root login). After you have done this, you may delete that line from your configuration and reconfigure to prevent root login.

Copy your ssh public key (eg: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) as <your-username-here>_rsa.pub and put guix-config.scm in the same directory. In a new terminal run these commands.

Due to the way we set up the bootloader section of the guix-config.scm, only the grub configuration file will be installed. So, we need to copy over some of the other GRUB stuff already installed on the Debian system:

Once it boots, you should be able to log in via SSH! (The server config will have changed though.) You may encounter an error like:

$ ssh root@<server ip address>
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@     WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!      @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:0B+wp33w57AnKQuHCvQP0+ZdKaqYrI/kyU7CfVbS7R4.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/joshua/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending ECDSA key in /home/joshua/.ssh/known_hosts:3
ECDSA host key for 198.58.98.76 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

Either delete ~/.ssh/known_hosts file, or delete the offending line starting with your server IP address.

You may not be able to run the above commands at this point. If you have issues remotely logging into your linode box via SSH, then you may still need to set your root and user password initially by clicking on the “Launch Console” option in your linode. Choose the “Glish” instead of “Weblish”. Now you should be able to ssh into the machine.

Hooray! At this point you can shut down the server, delete the Debian disk, and resize the Guix to the rest of the size. Congratulations!

By the way, if you save it as a disk image right at this point, you’ll have an easy time spinning up new Guix images! You may need to down-size the Guix image to 6144MB, to save it as an image. Then you can resize it again to the max size.

3.6 Running Guix on a Linode Server