Init - Arch Linux server on Hetzner vServer

2017/09/01

Categories: Server Tags: Docker Arch

Arch Linux server on Hetzner vServer

This is my first post on how I got running what you’re seeing here. Main purpose is documentation for myself and hopefully help some fellow web searchers with same goals and problems while doing that. In preparation I was searching the web too, of course, and did not exactly find what I wanted to find. There was no description on how to install a custom (as in the usual installation way) Archlinux on a Hetzner vserver.

Most general guides talk about pre-generated images or kinda complicated setups with local image building (like in a VirtualBox) and transferring it onto the server. With my strong goal in mind, to use btrfs, the first variant was not really the way to go, because they probably will use ext4. The second approach failed in my case too.

Some details: I configured the basic install with grub as bootloader, even though I use syslinux on my personal laptop. After getting into the basic differences and learning configuration of grub is intended to be very convenient (grub-mkconfig). In my case this was its fault too. Automatic device detection and writing a fitting config worked like a charm in VirtualBox’s environment, but after I wrote the image onto the server, of course, a device mismatch did happen. Especially when working with UUIDs a mismatch will quiet certainly occur. While trying to find a way to fix that with chrooting I stumbled upon Hetzner’s Archlinux image and how easy it is to modify its basic install properties like partitioning table.

Following I’ll describe the first steps I took until the basic server was running. At first this one blog entry won’t explain much but I hope to extent my documentation piece by piece.

That’s it. Your basic Hetzner Archlinux vserver is ready. I’ll continue this little blog series with docker and hugo next, because that’s already running, obviously. Some later goals are mailcow and a matrix server.