On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 05:32:07PM +0000, Etienne B. Roesch wrote: > Hi, > > I have been successful in convincing our IT dept to provide guix as > standard on our vms and research clusters. We use this sophisticated > platform that allows users to spawn a vm at will, and also use this shared > ldap user database to allow for people to log on from computers/terminals > spread on campus. Home directories are basically pulled from the OS (mostly > ubuntu and centos) as a shared file system on the network, which then > synchronises changes live. Practically, that means a user will find its > desktop, preferences and files as they move to different computers. > > Theoretically, a user can connect to several computers at the same time, > which can lead to conflict issues at times, e.g. firefox doesn't like > parallel access to its preferences. I haven't fully tested it, but we think > that a guix profile is specific to a given computer, because of the way it > links to the store, which is (currently) local to the vm, which isn't > ideal: the whole point of using vms is for users to kill them when they > don't need them. > > What would be the recommended way of solving this? Has anybody had a > similar situation? > I am thinking we could either: > - leave it as is, and train users to recreate their profiles whenever they > use a new vm/computer (after all, that's what guix is for) but it could > take some time to recompile if binaries aren't available > - maybe turn /gnu/store as a shared nfs folder CCing guix-science One thing we do on the small cluster at UTenn is /gnu and /var/guix (in addition to the home directories) are exported across NFS and then any profiles that are installed in the users' home directories have their symlinks not dangling. I also have a snippet in my .profile to use GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET to ssh back to the head node to use the guix-daemon there, which keeps all the guix stuff on one machine and easier to manage and make sure the same software is available on all the machines. -- Efraim Flashner רנשלפ םירפא GPG key = A28B F40C 3E55 1372 662D 14F7 41AA E7DC CA3D 8351 Confidentiality cannot be guaranteed on emails sent or received unencrypted