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My first NixOS Upgrade

NixOS 25.11 was released recently. So it was time to see how easy an upgrade for my NAS would be.

There are official upgrade instructions but I also found this reddit comment which gave a bit more advice.

So here is what I did. First I updated the channel:

# nix-channel --list
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-25.05
# nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-25.11 nixos
# nix-channel --list
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-25.11
# nix-channel --update
unpacking 1 channels...

Next the reddit post recommends reading through the changelog and updating the nixos config.

In my case the Postfix config changed. nixos-rebuild will complain about some settings, but not all. I fiddled with the settings until it no longer complained, then rebuild and rebooted:

# nixos-rebuild boot --upgrade
# reboot

The machine came up again correctly. But my postfix daemon wasn't working correctly. It took a bit more fiddling until I finally fixed it.

The whole upgrade took me about half an hour. Not too bad, but I am glad I am running most of my services via Docker compose, isolating them from the OS.

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nixos, linux
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