NixOS dead frozen on error in `fileSystems` entry, is this expected?

Help
1

Once I’ve been editing my mounted hard drives in fileSystems and boldly switched to the new config without testing first.

This resulted in the OS getting dead frozen, my SSH connection died out and I could never connect back. Similarly, the OS were unresponsive upon boot, not accepting SSH and not serving anything that it were supposed to. It were a whole quest to get it switched to the last known good configuration, as its boot console were not accessible.

Is this an expected behavior? I’m worried of the OS getting completely incapacitated by a problem in just one fstab entry.

To add more details, I’ve been legacy-mounting a ZFS volume with fileSystems (because automounting from ZFS filesystem mountpoint properties were not working for some reason), and forgot that it requires setting mountpoint to legacy explicitly before mounting

2

. It were a whole quest to get it switched to the last known good configuration, as its boot console were not accessible.

grub is supposed to offer you to boot older (working) generations.

No idea about the problem itself as I don’t know about zfs.

3

How is it supposed to offer this when you have no access to machine console? I could not figure that out. Had to edit the config on the EFI volume. Luckily, it were deisnged quite wisely, a plain text file with configs list and another one which sets the version number. That’s some good unix way =)

4

Ah, sorry, I understood “boot console not accessible” as “the generation does not boot far enough to reach getty”.