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.

• Boot into Rescue System. Either select Rescue System while ordering or later in Robot’s web UI
• Run installimage - select “Archlinux” and latest image file
• This opens install’s config file where several modifications can be made. What I did:
  • changed HOSTNAME to whatever I wanted
  • changed partitioning to PART / btrfs all so the file system will be btrfs
• Wait for the installation to be finished and login with the same method (password or ssh key) you did with the Rescue System.
• Note that the installation did basic setup tasks like setting the hostname. It would be interesting to see what’s happening in detail, so we’d know what happened to our Arch install. Especially with config intensive systems like Arch.
  • I’m going to assume everything from ArchWiki:Installation Guide has been dealt with by now.
• Next step is Post-Installation:
  • First thing, because it’s annoying is to fix some terminal trouble I encounter. Luckily there’s I’m not the first: ArchWiki:rxvt
    • install rxvt-unicode-terminfo on server

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.