Re: Hosting a GuixSD server on commodity hosting platforms, a journey

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice writes:

> Chris[es],
>
> [If ‘commodity’ means ‘whatever this OpenStack thing might be’, or
> anything involving comparison of pets to cattle, this is not that. But
> this caught my eye:]
>
> On 02/12/16 20:51, Christopher Baines wrote:
>> Thanks for looking in to this Chris! I'm using Bytemark for personal 
>> servers, and have tried and failed to install Guix from a Debian
>> live cd.
>
> Interesting. That should work.
>
> I've been running a pure (from scratch) GuixSD VPS[0] for the better
> half of a year. I bootstrapped from a provider-supplied SystemRescueCD
> image, since it has all required packages pre-installed, but any sane
> live system should do.

Hey great!  And yeah, at this point, maybe if I'm looking at booting
from a .ISO file, while generating a .ISO file is a noble goal still,
I problably should just try installing from another distro.

> Partition and format the target device. Mount that. Upload
> shiny-new-system.scm. Get your swapon. Bind mount /gnu, /var/guix and
> /tmp from temporary directories on /mnt, to prevent ‘guix system init
> /mnt’ filling up the RAM disc. Watch the builds scroll by. Reboot. Done.
>
> If I forgot anything, it can't have been much.
>
> A similar approach should work on all hosting providers that support
> booting live CDs that can run out of RAM. I suspect one could ‘snapshot’
> the base system on providers that support it, to spin up additional
> instances faster. I haven't tried; installing from scratch is just as
> easy and keeps the bits fresh.
>
> No idea how this relates to ‘commodity hosting’: SystemRescueCD happens
> to require console access to set the root password for SSH, but after
> that the entire deployment can be scripted. Mine are.
>
> It's as far from underdocumented (to the point of being proprietary)
> image layouts and shiny ‘API’s as possible, which is a nice bonus. :-)
>
> Kind regards,
>
> T G-R

Sounds good :)

> [0]: <https://liteserver.nl/>: I happily endorse them, and can't wait to
> send them a ‘Please add GuixSD-1.0.iso’ ticket when the time comes.

Wow cool, some of those are quite cheap!