Thanks! That's really helpful! How robust is your system to bandwidth
fluctuations and network hiccups?
How big is your store, /gnu, /var/guix?

How many users do you have?

Etienne

On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 6:32 AM Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>
wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 05:32:07PM +0000, Etienne B. Roesch wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have been successful in convincing our IT dept to provide guix as
> > standard on our vms and research clusters. We use this sophisticated
> > platform that allows users to spawn a vm at will, and also use this
> shared
> > ldap user database to allow for people to log on from computers/terminals
> > spread on campus. Home directories are basically pulled from the OS
> (mostly
> > ubuntu and centos) as a shared file system on the network, which then
> > synchronises changes live. Practically, that means a user will find its
> > desktop, preferences and files as they move to different computers.
> >
> > Theoretically, a user can connect to several computers at the same time,
> > which can lead to conflict issues at times, e.g. firefox doesn't like
> > parallel access to its preferences. I haven't fully tested it, but we
> think
> > that a guix profile is specific to a given computer, because of the way
> it
> > links to the store, which is (currently) local to the vm, which isn't
> > ideal: the whole point of using vms is for users to kill them when they
> > don't need them.
> >
> > What would be the recommended way of solving this? Has anybody had a
> > similar situation?
> > I am thinking we could either:
> > - leave it as is, and train users to recreate their profiles whenever
> they
> > use a new vm/computer (after all, that's what guix is for) but it could
> > take some time to recompile if binaries aren't available
> > - maybe turn /gnu/store as a shared nfs folder
>
> CCing guix-science
>
> One thing we do on the small cluster at UTenn is /gnu and /var/guix (in
> addition to the home directories) are exported across NFS and then any
> profiles that are installed in the users' home directories have their
> symlinks not dangling.
>
> I also have a snippet in my .profile to use GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to ssh
> back to the head node to use the guix-daemon there, which keeps all the
> guix stuff on one machine and easier to manage and make sure the same
> software is available on all the machines.
>
> --
> Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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