vpsAdminOS is a small OS serving as a host for unprivileged Linux system containers. It is based on NixOS and not-os. It is designed to run full distributions inside unprivileged containers which look and feel as much as a virtual machine as possible.
vpsAdminOS is developed and used in production by vpsFree.cz, a non-profit organization which provides virtual servers to its members. See vpsfree-cz-configuration for example cluster configuration.
- IRC: #vpsadminos @ irc.libera.chat
- Documentation: https://vpsadminos.org/
- Man pages: https://man.vpsadminos.org/
- OS and program references: https://ref.vpsadminos.org/
- ISO images: https://iso.vpsadminos.org/
vpsAdminOS uses:
- LTS kernel with a mix of out-of-tree patches to improve container experience,
- runit as an init system,
- ZFS for storage,
- our own tools for system container management called osctl,
- LXC is used to run the containers,
- BIRD for network routing.
Our kernel live-patch facility requires ccache to build the OS.
git clone https://github.com/vpsfreecz/vpsadminos/
cd vpsadminosvpsAdminOS is developed on top of the latest NixOS release, so make sure that
the correct version of nixpkgs is in NIX_PATH, or set it as follows:
git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs --branch nixos-25.05
export NIX_PATH=`pwd`vpsAdminOS can now be built and run:
# Build the OS
make
# Run under qemu
make qemu
The QEMU runner creates two disk images - sda.img and sdb.img which are added
as QEMU ATA drives and can be used to create a mirrored ZFS pool that persists
across reboots.
# Login via ssh or use qemu terminal with autologin
ssh -p 2222 localhost
# Configure osctld:
osctl pool install tank
# Create a container:
osctl ct new --distribution alpine myct01
# Configure container networking:
# Bridged veth
osctl ct netif new bridge --link lxcbr0 myct01 eth0
# Routed veth
osctl ct netif new routed myct01 eth1
osctl ct netif ip add myct01 eth1 1.2.3.4/32
# Start the container:
osctl ct start myct01
# Work with containers:
osctl ct ls
osctl ct attach myct01
osctl ct console myct01
osctl ct exec myct01 ip addr
# More information:
man osctl
# https://vpsadminos.org/user-guide/setup/
# https://vpsadminos.org/containers/administration/vpsAdminOS has its own binary cache which contains builds of vpsAdminOS with the current NixOS stable branch. Using it can save a lot of time building the kernel.
{ config, ... }:
{
nix.settings = {
substituters = [ "https://cache.vpsadminos.org" ];
trusted-public-keys = [ "cache.vpsadminos.org:wpIJlNZQIhS+0gFf1U3MC9sLZdLW3sh5qakOWGDoDrE=" ];
# Enable fallback in case the binary cache is unreachable
fallback = true;
connect-timeout = 15;
};
}