nix-config VS k8s-lab-terraform-libvirt

I bought a Brother HL-L2320D which at the time was the cheapest mono laser with duplexing I could find. On Windows and macOS it's fantastically uneventful, unfortunately on Linux the situation is less great. brlaser [0] does mostly work, but it seems there is a bug as some more complex documents (typically scans) won't print [1]. I ended up patching my version to reduce the size of one of the buffers [2], and haven't seen it fail since, but I doubt I've actually fixed the issue and instead just moved the threshold.

[0] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser

[1] - https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/issues/79#issuecomment-7...

[2] - https://github.com/benpye/nix-config/blob/main/overlays/brla...

HVF works with some patches that are on the mailing list; it's possible to get Nix to build it with an overlay. [1] for the base, then apply [2] to SLIRP if you don't want to use HVF's network adapter (which needs root). I'm happily running FreeBSD and Linux VMs on my Mac Mini with this

[1]: https://github.com/benpye/nix-config/tree/main/overlays/qemu

[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp/-/commit/72713...

https://blog.ruanbekker.com/blog/2020/10/08/using-the-libvir...

I include the blog link because there is some nuance in how to get the path right for community Terraform providers that aren't in the Hashicorp registry. The documentation on the GitHub project isn't quite up to date with respect to how the latest versions of Terraform expect the plugin paths to be set up.

I've done this pretty successfully with all the major Linux distros minus Arch, which requires some bootstrapping to get an iso that Packer can work with (no such thing as an answers file for Arch). It's not that big a deal, though. Just find some instructions on how to create and mount a cloud-init iso in addition to the installer iso and use that to add an ssh public key so you can script the installation steps externally. I actually think Packer can do this, but I just haven't gotten it to work yet and have relied on shell scripts.

Hyper-V actually has a very comprehensive PowerShell module that is pretty well documented, by the way: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/hyper-v/?.... I've found it pretty easy to use and actually got the Arch auto-provision working on Hyper-V in Windows before I got it working in KVM in Linux.

Another thing is you can just use the cloud images and cloud-init for bootstrapping everything pretty easily, even on-prem. cloud-init has a "no cloud" config option, as mentioned above, where you just mount an iso with the config data as a DVD drive and cloud-init will find it automatically when the distro iso boots.

This guy has a pretty comprehensive example of how to set up a kubernetes homelab entirely using the libvirt Terraform provider from Ubuntu cloud images bootstrapped with cloud-init: https://github.com/zloeber/k8s-lab-terraform-libvirt