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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Is multi user nix safe? (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 day ago by ranzispa@mander.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I'm thinking of setting up multi user nix on a compute cluster. The advantage would be to have a shared storage where common packages are reused, this is a great advantage compared to conda where every environment duplicates storage and inodes.

However, the packages are installed as root. As such I'm a bit wary of whether a user installing something could have the system run malware as root by installing a package.

What are the safeguards in place and how do I know I can trust them?

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[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you, you reassured me quite a bit. I'll have a good read of the manual.

It is not really a build server, it's a compute server. I'll have users installing hundreds of different software packages, most of them using incompatible libraries and thus I was thinking of using Nix. Alternatives would be LMOD, which however requires the administrator to install very single piece of software, which... We don't really have a dedicated system administrator and I don't really want to go through the compilation instructions of every single piece of software we use. Alternatively everyone could compile their own software or install it through something like conda, but that eats up a lot of storage space since every library would be duplicated across users.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

Well, in that case remember to force everyone to use the same Nixpkgs version (otherwise you'll still end up with a lot of duplicated packages), and run nix-store --optimise; nix-collect-garbage -d regularly (ideally via cron or something).