Right now the UX for installing NixOS on a headless system is very bad. To enable sshd without physical steps users have to have either physical access or need to be very knowledge-able to figure out how to modify the installation image by hand to put an `sshd.service` symlink in the right directory in /nix/store. This is in particular a problem on ARM SBCs (single board computer) but also other hardware where network is the only meaningful way to access the hardware. This commit enables sshd by default. This does not give anyone access to the NixOS installer since by default. There is no user with a non-empty password or key. It makes it easy however to add ssh keys to the installation image (usb stick, sd-card on arm boards) by simply mounting it and adding a keys to `/root/.ssh/authorized_keys`. Importantly this should not require nix/nixos on the machine that prepare the installation device and even feasiable on non-linux systems by using ext4 third party drivers. Potential new threats: Since this enables sshd by default a potential bug in openssh could lead to remote code execution. Openssh has a very good track-record over the last 20 years, which makes it far more likely that Linux itself would have a remote code execution vulnerability. It is trusted by millions of servers on many operating systems to be exposed to the internet by default. Co-authored-by: Samuel Dionne-Riel <samuel@dionne-riel.com> |
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doc | ||
lib | ||
maintainers | ||
modules | ||
tests | ||
COPYING | ||
default.nix | ||
README | ||
release-combined.nix | ||
release-small.nix | ||
release.nix |
*** NixOS *** NixOS is a Linux distribution based on the purely functional package management system Nix. More information can be found at https://nixos.org/nixos and in the manual in doc/manual.