Re: It's time to build "guix deploy"

[Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu>]

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Hi devel!

I'm *very* interested in this development... actually remote
provisioning of operating system - and services configuration - is the
reason I'm here :-)

"guix deploy infrastructure.scm" it's everyone dream, no? :-O

unfortunately I'm still not able to help in this development, I'm
writing just to show my *great* appreciation for each of you that *will*
make this dream come true

maybe a *design* document stored somewhere collecting all past and
present thoughts on this matter would help attracting contributions

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

> Thompson, David <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:
>
>> Other thoughts?
>
> Just for reference: to update Berlin build nodes I use this script:
>
>     https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/install-berlin.scm
>
> It’s not great, but it’s been helpful.

thanks for sharing! (even if I can still barely understand what your
script does)

actually mainenance.git is full of treasures :-)

> Berlin consists of a head node and many almost identical servers.

AFAIU remote servers could be completely different each other for your
script to do its job, or am I missing something?

> To
> update one or more servers I run the script on the head node, which
> generates operating system configuration variants for each of the
> requested servers, builds the systems (offloading to all of the
> connected build nodes), copies the system closures to the target
> systems, and then runs “reconfigure” on the targets.

explained this way seems easy :-O

> Since the operating system configuration record cannot be serialized,

is there any plan or wip on this kind of serialization?

> the build nodes need to have a copy of the code that’s used to generate
> the operating system configuration.  Not great.  (They only need it to
> run “reconfigure”; they wouldn’t need that if “reconfigure” could
> operate remotely.)

"just" having a "guix system reconfigure --host <remote-hostname/IP>"
would be a *huge* feature

> Anyway, I thought I’d share this with y’all.

IMHO your remote host configuration technique deserves a dedicated blog
article... but I've already asked too much :-)

Thanks!

Giovanni

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

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