Arch Linux on a Hetzner VPS

For reasons I decided to replace Debian, which I've always used for servers, with Arch Linux on the Hetzner VPS which hosts this website, among other things. As it turns out Hetzner has made this a relatively easy thing to do.

In the tab ISO IMAGES of your server control panel search for Arch Linux and mount the image.

Then reboot your VPS under the power tab and attach via VNC by clicking the terminal icon in the top right corner.

You are now booted into a Arch Linux installation iso like any other and can proceed installing Arch as usual.

The servers use BIOS as opposed to UEFI and have Intel CPUs so I used syslinux as the bootloader and installed the intel-ucode package. I went with a simple partition scheme:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 19.1G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0    2G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda2   8:2    0 17.1G  0 part /

The only thing that was a little different to my past Arch installs was networking: When I tried using dhcpcd, IPv4 worked fine but IPv6 didn't properly get its address and gateway assigned. Since the server has static IPv4 and IPv6 anyways, I disabled dhcpcd and set up static IP using systemd-networkd by writing the following in /etc/systemd/network/20-wired.network:

[Match]
Name=ens3

[Network]
Address=94.130.96.183/32
Address=2a01:4f8:c0c:83b0::1/64
DNS=8.8.8.8

[Route]
Gateway=172.31.1.1
GatewayOnLink=yes

[Route]
Gateway=fe80::1
GatewayOnLink=yes

Of course you should replace both addresses, the gateways might be the same for you. Then enable and start

systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd

That should be it! Of course you should only do this if you are confident in maintaining this system and are aware of the risks.