Back in November, the First Workshop on Reproducible Software
Environments for Research and High-Performance
Computing was held in
Montpellier, France. Coming from France primarily but also from
Czechia, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, and the United
Kingdom to name a few, 120 people—scientists, high-performance computing
(HPC) practitioners, system administrators, and enthusiasts alike—came
to listen to the talks, attend the tutorials, and talk to one another.
This post is about using Guix for the provisioning and management of cloud
machines and services. Beyond the official documentation, there are various
great tutorials around this topic already, like this one, this one, or this
other one. I'm writing this up primarily as a note-to-self, and in case my
specific approach can be of interest to anyone else.
Dealing with secrets in functional operating systems can range from pretty usable to complete hell. Nix has several answers to this problem, the more integrated of which appears to be sops-nix. After spending some months envying our neighbors grass, I figured it was time for Guix to have its own (attempt at an) answer to the secrets problem.
If you need to run Grafana on the Guix System this post is the right place. In this example we'll setup Grafana to read metrics from the same machine it's run upon, but you can adapt this to use a remote datasource.
This is the outline of a short session on Guix that I had the chance to organise
at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, or 37c3, in December 2023. It's not
worth much, but I thought it was useful to have it here in case I want to reuse
it or refer to it in the future.
How I made a program for Windows and GNU/Linux without touching any Windows
machine. The tools and the tricks to be effective (Zig and NSIS for the win).
Many applications are packaged in OCI/Docker images but not in Guix. A good subset of them is written either in NodeJS, Go, Rust or languages that, as a general approach, encourage applications to have huge dependency graphs.