Re: Installing guix on a cluster

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Reza,

Reza Housseini <reza.housseini@gmail.com> skribis:

> I installing guix on our institutes cluster and followed the
> instructions in this blog post [1]. But there are a couple of problems
> I stumbled upon:
>
> - There is no mention how to mount the nfs shares on the nodes. I
>   added them to the /etc/fstab file but I'm unsure about the mount
>  options

Just mount /gnu/store and /var/guix as NFS.  The store should be mounted
read-only; /var/guix must be writable.  But that’s about it, no special
options are needed.

> - Thers is no guix binary on the nodes. I added a symlink to
>   /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix/bin/guix in
>   /usr/local/bin

Yes, that’s what needs to be done.

> but when I try to install a package from a node I get an open-file
> permission denied for
> /var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/guix-profile.lock

It looks like you’re running ‘guix’ on the node as root.  Try running it
as non-root instead.

(If you really want to be able to run ‘guix’ as root on the nodes, then
you need to pass the ‘norootsquash’ (not sure about the spelling) option
for the /var/guix NFS mount.  That’s not a great idea though.)

> - In this email [2] it was mentioned I don't have to pass listen to
>   the guix-daemon, as the socket gets shared over nfs, but when I
>   remove the listen argument and try to install a package from a node
>   I get a failed to connect to /var/guix/daemon-socket/socket:
>  connection refused

Unix-domain sockets cannot be shared over NFS.  You have to use the
‘--listen’ option and set ‘GUIX_DAEMON_SOCKET’ as explained in
<https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2017/11/installing-guix-on-a-cluster/>.

HTH!

Ludo’.