Automount a Hetzner Storage Box with sshfs on NixOS
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I had my eyes on some nice arm64 servers from Hetzner, and I finally pulled the trigger, I got the CAX21.
It is also the opportunity to reduce time of maintaining my infrastructure, I will use NixOS to setup my server. By having a couple of configuration files, it will be easier to review, edit and update the system.
But time will tell if it is the good decision, and not sticking to a imperative distribution such as Debian.
Not a lot of storage
The only downside with these servers is the storage -- I only have 80 gigabytes of storage on mine.
Fortunately, Hetzner has their Storage Box offerings, I picked up a BX11 which has 1 terabyte of storage!
The plan is to mount the storage box as a regular drive and have applications use it normally. The main applications will be documents, media, backups -- not speed critical data such as databases or logs.
Storage Box ordering and setup
Start by ordering your Storage Box, I think mine took less than an hour to be provisioned and delivered to me.
On the configuration panel, I only ticked SSH support and the disabled the rest.
If you will use the storage box outside of the Hetzner network, enable External reachability.
Finally, you cannot set the password yourself, you will have to reset it.
SSH keys
On the server, generate a new ssh key with ssh-keygen which will be used to connect to the storage box.
Since I want the storage box to be mounted automatically on startup, so I did not set a passphrase on the key.
Copy the ssh to the storage box with:
ssh-copy-id -p 23 -s user@storagebox.example.org
More documentation on ssh keys with storage box: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/storage-box/backup-space-ssh-keys
NixOS configuration
The easy part, and the reason why I think I will like to use NixOS on my server:
You can put it inside your configuration.nix directly, I placed it inside its own file.
{ ... }:
{
fileSystems."/mnt/storagebox" = {
device = "user@storagebox.example.org:/some/path";
fsType = "fuse.sshfs";
options = [
"identityfile=/place/to/ssh/key/somewhere"
"idmap=user"
"x-systemd.automount" # mount the filesystem automatically on first access
"allow_other" # don't restrict access to only the user which `mount`s it (because that's probably systemd who mounts it, not you)
"user" # allow manual `mount`ing, as ordinary user.
"_netdev"
];
};
boot.supportedFilesystems."fuse.sshfs" = true;
}
Thank you so much to this Discourse post for the configuration snippet!
Run
nixos-rebuild switch && cd /mnt/storagebox
and you are able to read and write files!