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 Have an awesome week! Etienne
