Running guix system services only

Running guix system services only

[Benjamin]

Hello,

I am trying to transfer smoothly from a standard Debian to a Guix system
on one of my servers.

What I would like to do for that is a "service-only" guix system.
Such a system would be able to run all existing system services but
without controling the bootloader / initrd / kernel / file-systems.
This guix system would run in parallel of the host linux.

I guess the idea would be to create some "noop" definitions
of bootloader / initrd / kernel / etc...
and then to "plug" into systemd (or whatever else) by running the
"activate script".

Did some of you have tried to run guix system only with the services
part ? If this is the case, how did you do ?

Maybe this use case is described somewhere in the doc, but I did not
find it.

Best

Benjamin

Re: Running guix system services only

[Felix Lechner via]

Hi Benjamin,

On Tue, Nov 21 2023, Benjamin wrote:

> I am trying to transfer smoothly from a standard Debian to a Guix system
> on one of my servers.

I would recommend to migrate to a new Guix server instead and use your
DNS or other configuration methods to coordinate between the two. That's
what I did, from Debian stable, about a year and a half ago.

The Guix part was very painful for me, but I turned off the Debian
server after four weeks. I am still learning about Guix but have reached
a point where I am comfortable trying to contribute.

Guix is an amazing package manager (and distribution) that runs much
more stable than anything I've used in the past. The learning curve is
brutal but was totally worth it!

IRC is your friend.

Kind regards
Felix

Re: Running guix system services only

[Wojtek Kosior via]

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Hi all!

> On Tue, Nov 21 2023, Benjamin wrote:
> 
> > I am trying to transfer smoothly from a standard Debian to a Guix system
> > on one of my servers.  
> 
> I would recommend to migrate to a new Guix server instead and use your
> DNS or other configuration methods to coordinate between the two. That's
> what I did, from Debian stable, about a year and a half ago.

I just noticed this thread — this is more or less the problem I am
trying to deal with.  On my VPS running Debian I moved most of my
services into a Guix container.  The directories with important state
(e.g. user homes with Maildirs inside, gitolite repositories, some
static files being served over HTTP) are shared with the host.  User
ids of some daemons inside the container are set to be the same as
outside.

The container communicates with the outside world through a veth pair.
The host has some internet-facing ports forwarded to the container.  If
you're curious, here[1] is the code that spins up the container.  It is
called from an init script (managed by systemd but the script itself is
sysV-compatible).

The overall result is somewhat messy and I would like to already have
everything running under a full Guix system.  Meanwhile, I've been
stuck in this transition for over a year now — it's probably just as
inconvenient as insecure.

A full system would allow one to utilize
- the unatended-upgrade-service-type
- and the `guix deploy` command.

So — to all who are yet to do such a migration — my suggestion would be
not to set up a Guix container the way I did it.  If you have a second
server — Felix' approach is probably the best.  Otherwise, a VM with
Guix inside could be a a more practical solution than containers — as
long as the server you're going to run it on has enough RAM

Best :)
Wojtek


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On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 05:59:05 -0800 Felix Lechner via <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hi Benjamin,
> 
> On Tue, Nov 21 2023, Benjamin wrote:
> 
> > I am trying to transfer smoothly from a standard Debian to a Guix system
> > on one of my servers.  
> 
> I would recommend to migrate to a new Guix server instead and use your
> DNS or other configuration methods to coordinate between the two. That's
> what I did, from Debian stable, about a year and a half ago.
> 
> The Guix part was very painful for me, but I turned off the Debian
> server after four weeks. I am still learning about Guix but have reached
> a point where I am comfortable trying to contribute.
> 
> Guix is an amazing package manager (and distribution) that runs much
> more stable than anything I've used in the past. The learning curve is
> brutal but was totally worth it!
> 
> IRC is your friend.
> 
> Kind regards
> Felix
> 

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Re: Running guix system services only

[Simon Tournier]

Hey Benjamin!

On Tue, 21 Nov 2023 at 17:47, "Benjamin" <benjamin@uvy.fr> wrote:

> Did some of you have tried to run guix system only with the services
> part ? If this is the case, how did you do ?

In addition to other replies in the thread, maybe you could share what
you already have next time in Parisian Guix Meetup. :-)

Cheer,
simon