Thanks a ton!
I think we've arrived at the limit of how I understand the daemon to work,
and GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. I think I understand that you are using a single
node (hpc of sort I imagine), where users create sessions, and within which
you provide the guix command, having set up GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to a
unix-domain socket (to that same node / itself). That makes total sense in
the context of the single node. Did I get that right?
I think what we are aiming for, in our case (where users each have their
own nodes as it were, only sharing network drives), is providing the guix
command on each node, set up with GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET connecting with ssh to
a master node with a daemon, that itself would have access to the same
network drives.
Etienne
On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 2:48 PM Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>
wrote:
"Etienne B. Roesch" <etienne.roesch@gmail.com> writes:
Hiccups: we provide home dirs as nfs drives through the network. Using
guix, we are thinking of creating one nfs drive, shared by all
users, to contain /var/guix and /gnu/store, symlinked from /.
As I understand, that should work, until a user decides to run "guix gc"
(which would clear wrongly assumed unused profiles) or maybe
until a user decides to launch several vms (which is theoretically
possible, but doesn't happen often).
I would strongly discourage the use of profiles in users’ home
directories. When introducing Guix we now only demo “guix shell”, which
is preferrable in most cases. “guix gc” is problematic when profile
links are in locations that the daemon cannot read.
Efraim suggested using a shared daemon ssh-ing GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET. We
would probably run this on a separate vm. We are however unsure how it
would behave when /var/guix/daemon-socket/socket is itself on an nfs.
We only export /var/guix/profiles, not anything else in /var/guix.
Using GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET with a network port (make “guix-daemon” listen
on that port) is all we ever needed.
--
Ricardo Wurmus
System administrator
BIMSB - Scientific Bioinformatics Platform
Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine
email: ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de
tel: +49 30 9406 1796