Non-privileged daemons and offloading

[Ben Woodcroft]

Hi there,

I've recently gotten access to a supercomputer where I don't have sudo, and I'm trying to hatch a plan to run guix packaged programs. Unfortunately, I don't have anything substantial like a container-based build environment to add here, only a potential workaround idea.

I could run the daemon normally as a regular user, but I'm afraid of the issues that arise due to inability to chroot as described in the manual. Instead, I'm considering offloading the builds to a separate machine, where a guix-daemon runs as sudo and so can run builds in the chroot. IIUC, this gets around the issue of impurities in builds while not requiring sudo.

One hole the plan I can see is that at least according to the manual, offloads are defined in "/etc/guix/machines.scm" which as a regular user I cannot modify. Is there any other way to specify offload machines e.g. via an argument to 'guix-daemon'? Is there any better ways to go about this whole thing in general?

Thanks,
ben