Repurposed a Mac Pro 6,1 "Trashcan" into a headless NixOS CI Node

I finally pulled my Late 2013 Mac Pro (Trashcan) off the shelf to turn it into a dedicated infrastructure node for my homelab/studio.

The main challenge with these cylinders is that they are a nightmare for standard Linux distros, specifically the proprietary Broadcom BCM4360 Wi-Fi chips and the custom thermal zones (if you don't manage the fans via software, it apparently cooks itself?).

I built a declarative NixOS configuration ("Macpronix") that solves this out of the box.

The Stack:

Hardware: Mac Pro 6,1 (12-Core Xeon)

OS: NixOS 24.11 (Immutable)

Networking: Tailscale (Mesh VPN) + WPA_Supplicant (Broadcom patched)

Cooling: mbpfan daemon configured declaratively

It's now running as a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner. If anyone else is hoarding one of these units, this flake might save you some headaches.

Repository (The Config): https://github.com/tarantula-org/macpronix

Video Demo: https://youtu.be/6Q6fP5wvPn4