Setting up a Clan machine using PXE boot

On this page I seem to always lose my USB drives when I need to make a live USB. Recently I needed one to install Clan on my Beelink Mini S12 Pro. [1] Clan is a peer-to-peer computer management framework for NixOS. It lets you fully provision a remote machine in a declarative way. So, if Clan can control a machine over the network, why not just initially boot the machine over the network too? Then I wouldn't need to go out and buy a new flash drive. This is where Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) boot saves the day. You run a PXE server on one machine that will serve up an image to boot. The client machine does a little autodiscovery, downloads the image and boots into it. In my case, I used pixiecore to chain load NixOS and then installed Clan from that. The catch is that Clan uses SSH to connect to a remote machine and a stock NixOS image will not have the SSH public key for the machine that will configure it. So I did the following: Set up a Clan project to manage machines. Baked…