Re: guix on nfs based systems

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

"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