Re: Advice about GuixSD on Serveraptor?

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

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On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 03:22:43PM -0500, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
> Leo Famulari writes:
> > I can easily create an image to use for this, but I don't want to do it
> > if others think I am going beyond the level of trust placed in me by the
> > Guix project.
> 
> So, if you provided the source scheme to generate the image, and signed
> the image, people would both have the option to generate the image
> themselves, or download your signed binary image if they trust you?

Not exactly...

Serveraptor offers users a set of images to choose from, but they don't
have a method by which users can upload their own images. You'd have to
make a special arrangement for that.

So what I'm doing here is trying to provide Serveraptor with a GuixSD
image that they'd offer to users.

People could regenerate the image themselves, but it would be difficult
to verify that it matches what is offered by Serveraptor.

There are VPS providers that provide an image upload system but, as far
as I know, none of them accept raw QEMU images. They all want
ISO-formatted images.

> Honestly, at this point the most important thing is to get things to the
> point where we have *a* documented process to install GuixSD on these
> servers; once we have that, and assuming we also have documentation /
> tooling where people could reproduce the whole process (even if they
> used the image you provided, as long as they could reproduce that step
> too) I think we're in a much better state than we are... and we could
> refine further from there.

My idea is to create a bare-bones GuixSD image using `guix system
vm-image` and provide that to Serveraptor. Users would boot directly
into the system and reconfigure it to fit their needs. 

If by "install GuixSD" you mean "boot the GuixSD USB install and
initialize the system", that does work, but it's not very satisfying
because Serveraptor's management interface does not expose the
virtualized storage devices, so it's difficult (impossible?) to reclaim
the partition used by the installer.

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