How Nixorium began in a school computer lab.

The network restriction complicated installation, updates, and recovery. The machines needed to be prepared consistently using resources available inside the lab, before students signed in.

The resulting workflow used one controller to prepare systems and serve them locally. Students could still use the school’s authenticated Internet access during their sessions.

The lab had previously been administered with Clonezilla and then Ansible. Nix and Colmena shifted the operating model toward describing the intended systems and deploying that configuration repeatedly.

UEFI PXE allowed workstations to be installed without starting each one from USB. It was used for installation; the installed PCs booted from their own disks. A local binary cache supplied prepared software, and Colmena coordinated later deployments.

A DHCP address served the school network alongside a static address for local management.

Students mostly used VS Code, Chromium, Docker, and Git. GNOME was chosen because it was already familiar to them.

Programming work used Git. Students chose their own server, and almost everyone used GitHub. Other documents went to Google Drive through their school accounts.

The student home returned to a clean template at boot, while local snapshots kept earlier states available for file recovery. This reset the student workspace, not the entire system.

A fully ephemeral system with selected persistent state was considered. For this lab, resetting the home and retaining snapshots was operationally simpler.

The original deployment was observed to reinstall the lab in approximately one hour. More importantly, maintenance became more predictable: one declared configuration, consistent machines, and a repeatable route to rebuilding a workstation.