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nix-community
impermanence
Nix2022–2026
nix-community / impermanence

impermanence

Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz]

14Distinct people
14Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage [maintainer=@talyz]

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I use colmena[1] to manage one nixos configuration for multiple machines: - laptop - desktop - server - rpi nas I also wipe my entire rootfs every boot with a zfs snapshot…

techhazard used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-01-24 18:10:48 UTC to 2026-08-26 08:04:19 UTC.

012342022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

2 sources
A lot of these problems seem pretty solveable, if you're the admin of the machine (or cloud system) and the user isn't. If you don't want a user to log in as root, disable the root password (or change it to something only you know) and disable root ssh. If you want people to stop sharing the same login and password across all servers, there's several ways to do it but the most straightforward one seems like it would be to enforce the use of a hardware key (yubikey or similar) for login. If people aren't using configuration management software and are leaving machines in an inconsistent state, again there are several options but I'd look into this NixOS project: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence + some policy of rebooting the machines regularly. If you don't like how users are making use of AWS resources and secrets, then set u
Read the rest
p AWS permissions to force them to do so the correct way. In general if someone is using a system in a bad or insecure way, then after alerting them with some lead time, deliberately break their workflow and force them to come to you in order to make progress. If the thing you suggest is actually the correct course of action for your organization, then it will be worthwhile.
In Advent of Sysadmin 2025
This is a tough problem to solve. I currently use NixOS with impermanence [1] which is one way of solving it. Impermanence, in short, allows you to explicitely opt-in the files and directories that are persisted after each reboot. So while my `~` is not "clean" in the sense that all my config files are in `~/.config`, it is "clean" in the sense that all files in `~` are there for a reason (i.e., `~` is not polluted by the old config/cache of uninstalled packages). [1] https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
In Xdg-ninja: checking your $HOME for unwanted files and directories

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