throwaway17995

Joined 3 years ago

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May 8

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    To edit it, you must edit your system Nix configuration in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and then rebuild your system, which —get this — requires a network connection to complete! So somehow, to connect to the Internet, you must be able to connect to the Internet.

I'll be pedantic and say that this isn't true, it's not required for you to be connected to the internet to rebuild your system when you're only changing /etc/hosts. However, the fact that it's not immediately obvious _how_ to do this is a rather bad problem with NixOS's tooling.

For what it's worth, the following worked for me, though there appear to be other ways as well:

    cd /etc/nixos # Or wherever you store your configuration.
    nixos-rebuild build
    sudo nix-env -p /nix/var/nix/profiles/system/ --set ./result
    sudo ./result/bin/switch-to-configuration switch

And finally, for a neat report from a few years ago on using NixOS without an internet connection: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/using-nixos-in-an-isolated-env...

Comment · 3 years ago

    What you might not be as familiar with is that these authentication sites often block you from visiting any domain at all, and then to access the authentication site on their own domain you must explicitly link their domain to an IP address through the /etc/hosts file.³
    
    3. I'm assuming on Mac and Windows this is taken care of for you somehow and it is a non-problem.

I... have never had to do this in any distro or OS (NixOS, Arch, macOS at least). The way I've found captive portals to work in practice is that when I connect to the WiFi, my computer gets the captive portal's DNS server through DHCP, and their DNS server points any and every website to the IP address of the captive portal. To make it even easier, Firefox checks "detectportal.firefox.com" every so often to see whether or not there's a captive portal, and gives me a prompt to log in to it if need be.