JayRovacsek/nixos.md

Installation of NixOS with encrypted root

This is forked from martijnvermaat and modified to reflect my recent application of the same process.

My use-case here is to have a FDE setup that also supports grub os-prober - until I can find time to sort LookingGlass as a declarative config also.

Most of this is scrambled from the following pages:

Partitioning

We create a 500MB EFI boot partition (/dev/sda1) and the rest will be our LUKS encrypted physical volume for LVM (/dev/sda2).

$ dfisk /dev/sda

n (create new empty partition table)
t (add partition, 500M, type EFI)
n (add partition, remaining space, type LVM)
w (write partition table and exit)

Setup the encrypted LUKS partition and open it:

$ cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda2
$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 enc-pv

We create two logical volumes, a 8GB swap parition and the rest will be our root filesystem

$ pvcreate /dev/mapper/enc-pv
$ vgcreate vg /dev/mapper/enc-pv
$ lvcreate -L 8G -n swap vg
$ lvcreate -l '100%FREE' -n root vg

Format the partitions:

$ mkfs.fat /dev/sda1
$ mkfs.ext4 -L root /dev/vg/root
$ mkswap -L swap /dev/vg/swap

Installing NixOS

We mount the partitions we just created under /mnt so we can install NixOS on them.

$ mount /dev/vg/root /mnt
$ mkdir /mnt/boot
$ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
$ swapon /dev/vg/swap

Optional for Wireless Hosts

Configure WPA supplicant so we can use WIFI:

$ cat > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
network={
  ssid="****"
  psk="****"
}
^D
$ systemctl start wpa_supplicant

Create Config

Now generate a NixOS configuration and modify it to our liking. The following is the configuration I started with.

$ nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
$ cat > /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
      ./hardware-configuration.nix
    ];

  # Use the GRUB 2 boot loader.
  boot.loader.grub.enable = true;
  boot.loader.grub.version = 2;
  boot.loader.grub.device = "nodev";
  boot.loader.grub.enableCryptodisk = true;
  boot.loader.grub.efiSupport = true;
  boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;

  boot.initrd.luks.devices.crypted = {
      # the below should be a UUID as reported by `blkid`
      device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/MYUUID";
      preLVM = true;
  };
}

If we're happy with the configuration, install NixOS and reboot.

$ nixos-install
$ reboot

Troubleshooting

If for whatever reason the system doesn't boot, we can go back to the installation environment by booting from the installation media and remounting all partitions:

$ cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda2 enc-pv
$ lvchange -a y /dev/vg/swap
$ lvchange -a y /dev/vg/root
$ mount /dev/vg/root /mnt
$ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
$ swapon /dev/vg/swap
$ cp /mnt/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf /etc
$ systemctl start wpa_supplicant

We can now make further modifications to the configuration and try again.