Linux and NixOS sysadmin
San Francisco, CA · danforthls@skyseekerlabs.net
Hi, I'm Lillian. I'm an IT professional focused on Linux and sysadmin work, specifically NixOS and declarative config, with secondary skills in electronics technician work and hands-on building. I run a five-machine NixOS fleet with tested backups and monitoring that has caught real failures, and I take on IT work through SkyseekerLabs.
Run 5 NixOS machines (2 desktops, a home server, a public VPS, and a recovery/install ISO) from one Git-tracked flake, with every host reproducible from the repo and no hand-run setup steps. The home server's root filesystem is wiped on every boot, so only explicitly declared state survives.
see it →Wrote a restore drill suite, run monthly, and an automated canary check that restore from real ZFS and Restic backups into scratch space and verify the data; a full-scale test restored 873 GB in 11 h 17 min.
see it →Public traffic lands on a small hardened VPS that tunnels home over WireGuard, so the home server is never directly reachable from the internet. The home server builds the VPS's configuration and pushes it over Tailscale, so the small VPS never compiles its own config.
see it →Set up fleet-wide log collection with Grafana Alloy, Loki, and Grafana, and periodic ZFS, SMART, and systemd health checks that send a Discord alert when a disk or service fails. The alerts caught silent checksum corruption from a faulty USB drive enclosure, traced to its UAS link and fixed with a kernel quirk and a cable replacement.
see it →Set up declarative SOPS-based secret management shared across 4 machines, each decrypting with its own age key, stored in a public GitHub repo without leaking secrets.
see it →Automated remote installation and declarative NixOS configuration of servers using nixos-anywhere; 98% of setup is automated, with only secret provisioning done by hand. A full reinstall of the public VPS takes about 30 minutes, nearly all of it unattended.
see it →
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