TierHive - Update post - 24th October 2026 - Now supporting NixOS (super tuned)

AnthonySmith

@WSS said:

@AnthonySmith said: Devuan 6.1 is now available,

Lawds. Back when I joined TIerHive you had to roll your own! zswap is decent, but the base install can be pruned a bit- exchange OpenSSH for Dropbear, tighter init and flushing. The installer itself fails hard at 96MB, but can just scoot by with 128MB provided you're gentle with it.

Yeah I have to balance it so standard users don't struggle, might add recipes for further tuning.

AnthonySmith

@vpsgeek3333 said:
General question about NAT VPS:

Why no one offers Windows KVM/Hyper-V NAT VPS in general, is it due to high resource usage by Windows or Microsoft licensing terms and conditions?

I have been having similar thoughts and conversations in my head recently, while it's tempting it might be a totally different product.

I might add windows xp for funzies

WSS

@AnthonySmith said: I might add windows xp for funzies

You do realize the first thing people are going to do is install ancient web browsers and then bitch when nothing works, right?

Also, licensing. Even if you add an "unsupported" version of Windows for play, someone's going to try to bring their own. Not a great place to start from.

@AnthonySmith said:

@WSS said:

@AnthonySmith said: Devuan 6.1 is now available,

Lawds. Back when I joined TIerHive you had to roll your own! zswap is decent, but the base install can be pruned a bit- exchange OpenSSH for Dropbear, tighter init and flushing. The installer itself fails hard at 96MB, but can just scoot by with 128MB provided you're gentle with it.

Yeah I have to balance it so standard users don't struggle, might add recipes for further tuning.

If you prune down to virtio and no extra junk like pcspkr, et al, you can get it down to Alpine size in-RAM use. It's amazingly versatile for being a recent Debian base.

vpsgeek3333

@AnthonySmith said:

@vpsgeek3333 said:
General question about NAT VPS:

Why no one offers Windows KVM/Hyper-V NAT VPS in general, is it due to high resource usage by Windows or Microsoft licensing terms and conditions?

I have been having similar thoughts and conversations in my head recently, while it's tempting it might be a totally different product.

I might add windows xp for funzies

I recently suggested it to a friend also who provides KVM Windows VPS hosting with BYOL policy, he was worried about getting under the radar of MS because he thinks with NAT VPS e.g Windows Server 2025...many users would possibly use cracked licenses on the same IPv4 with shared ports.

Suggested Hyper-V NAT VPS product to another provider who does have legit Windows Server 2025 Datacenter edition on 4-5 year old hardware doing nothing, he was afraid of MS terms and conditions regarding this.

I have observed that hosting providers not located in Europe and US are more open to suggestions regarding Windows products. Makes no sense to worry about MS policies when you have already paid a lot to MS for a Windows Datacenter edition which lets you host unlimited Hyper-V VPS.

TierHive should offer it, Windows XP will be fun definitely. For other versions of windows like Server 2019/2022/2025, offer it only when you're sure it is not going to bring any trouble since you are also based in the UK.

risturiz

https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0416-released/

AnthonySmith

@risturiz said:
https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0416-released/

That could be the move!

AnthonySmith

Gentoo is also available again, the stock image is bloated with a capital PH rerolled runs on 384mb and 7GB disk with a 7.2.x kernel

It is what it is, if you use gentoo you already know I dont need to say much more, you know what you want and no one will change your mind.

MX Linux, NixOS and Void tomorrow and that should bring the crazy template revamp to an end, everything relevant should be covered.

marios

I'm curious to see how low you can push NixOS resource usage

AnthonySmith

@marios said:
I'm curious to see how low you can push NixOS resource usage

Well it's kind of reversed optimisations in that you end up shooting yourself in the foot.

terrorgen

@marios said:
I'm curious to see how low you can push NixOS resource usage

Us too. @AnthonySmith if you managed to do it, we would love to see your nix files.

unlilpromax

nice

AnthonySmith

Void Linux added.

# uname -a
Linux gravelines-void-linux-01 6.18.59_1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Oct 27 00:31:02 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:              85          39          15           0          38          46
Swap:            127           0         127

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs         35M     0   35M   0% /dev
tmpfs            43M     0   43M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs            43M  272K   43M   1% /run
/dev/vda1       929M  340M  574M  38% /
tmpfs            43M     0   43M   0% /tmp

top - 19:02:17 up 1 min,  0 users,  load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
Tasks: 85 total, 1 running, 83 sleep, 0 d-sleep, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  4.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 90.9 id,  0.0 wa,  4.5 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
MiB Mem :     85.7 total,     12.6 free,     41.7 used,     38.6 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:    128.0 total,    128.0 free,      0.0 used.     44.0 avail Mem 

Musl based, rolling release, void uses bin/sh as standard not bash, I enabled zswap as standard, and it works on 128mb ram and 1GB disk.

I think it was @flips that was asking about it a while ago?

Enjoy!

AnthonySmith

Long day, but Florida, Brazil and South Africa are live.

As always starting with minimal hardware specs to get a feel and see if its worth spending more money in that location.... cough cough Vancouver sucks!

risturiz

O-M-G LETS GO!!

AnthonySmith

NixOS... why does it exist... I don't know; do I hate it? yes, Do I appreciate it.. also yes, will I use it ever again... maybe, part of me feels like I could make an insanely tuned hypervisor out of it, the other part of me says... debain is fine thanks.

Anyway... it took 2 days longer than expected but I got it functional with 512mb ram and 5GB disk (you can get away with 3 but not if you want to use it)

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1       4.9G  1.5G  3.4G  30% /
tmpfs           116M  2.3M  114M   2% /run
devtmpfs         24M     0   24M   0% /dev
tmpfs           232M     0  232M   0% /dev/shm
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/systemd-journald.service
tmpfs           232M 1008K  231M   1% /run/wrappers
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/systemd-networkd.service
none            1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /run/credentials/[email protected]
tmpfs            47M  4.0K   47M   1% /run/user/0

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             463         107         217           3         171         355
Swap:            462           0         462

top - 19:56:35 up 9 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.02
Tasks: 69 total, 1 running, 67 sleep, 0 d-sleep, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  4.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 90.9 id,  0.0 wa,  4.5 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
MiB Mem :    463.1 total,    217.1 free,    107.5 used,    171.7 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:    463.0 total,    463.0 free,      0.0 used.    355.6 avail Mem 

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# nixos-version 
26.05.13050.08d3a97586f6 (Yarara)

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# uname -r
6.18.59

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# ls -la /etc/nixos/
total 28
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 Oct 28 19:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root  4096 Oct 29 19:47 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   197 Oct 29 18:57 configuration.nix
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   433 Oct 29 18:57 hardware-configuration.nix
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 11822 Oct 29 18:57 tierhive.nix

[root@gravelines-nixos-01:~]# nix-env --list-generations --profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/system
  10   2026-10-29 18:58:31   (current)

It was a SOB to get running within 512mb ram and also functional during rebuild; it should be said 512MB is JUST enough, so probably experts only or give yourself 640 at least, my first tests: nothing worked with anything less than 1GB Ram and that was pushing it.

Anyway, the template is live, and feedback is welcome; strong OS choice... but who am I to judge? The panel even needed a small update for this to stop password resets from falling back to md5 haha.

AnthonySmith

Thats the template work done for now, we will just run monthly updates as needed going forward, we do have 1 in the works that might take a while as its a very custom spin of Alpine cut to the bone and tuned specifically for TierHive but thats a project in its own right.

WSS

@AnthonySmith said: NixOS... why does it exist

I like that this is the distribution that broke you. Now try to get DragonflyBSD to run in 512MB and a small disk.

When you went to Devuan and Void, I figured you were just following the distributions I went through in reverse order.

terrorgen

This by itself needs a standing ovation. I believe you have gone where no one in NixOS ever had been.

Wonder if you are willing to upstream your nix files, or at least share it here?

AnthonySmith

@terrorgen said:
This by itself needs a standing ovation. I believe you have gone where no one in NixOS ever had been.

Wonder if you are willing to upstream your nix files, or at least share it here?

Sure feel free to strip out and share whatever, I will do a write up on everything tomorrow, I kept notes.

terrorgen

I need you need to anyway, since people need to import it to keep their NixOS configuration minimal.