Non-privileged daemons and offloading

[Ben Woodcroft <b.woodcroft@uq.edu.au>]

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Hi there,

I've recently gotten access to a supercomputer where I don't have sudo, 
and I'm trying to hatch a plan to run guix packaged programs. 
Unfortunately, I don't have anything substantial like a container-based 
build environment to add here, only a potential workaround idea.

I could run the daemon normally as a regular user, but I'm afraid of the 
issues that arise due to inability to chroot as described in the manual. 
Instead, I'm considering offloading the builds to a separate machine, 
where a guix-daemon runs as sudo and so can run builds in the chroot. 
IIUC, this gets around the issue of impurities in builds while not 
requiring sudo.

One hole the plan I can see is that at least according to the manual, 
offloads are defined in "/etc/guix/machines.scm" which as a regular user 
I cannot modify. Is there any other way to specify offload machines e.g. 
via an argument to 'guix-daemon'? Is there any better ways to go about 
this whole thing in general?

Thanks,
ben

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