IRC channel logs

2023-09-19.log

back to list of logs

<zimoun>hi!
<civodul>hey!
<rekado>I just gave a talk in front of system administrators of various German research institutes
<rekado>next week I’ll conduct a 3 hour workshop for those in the audience who want to learn how to set up Guix and build packages
<civodul>wo0t!
<civodul>so how did it go?
<rekado>very well. I think.
<civodul>then again, who wouldn’t be beguiled by one of your talks? :-)
<rekado>(I find it very hard to gauge audience engagement when giving online talks)
<civodul>what was the context again?
<zimoun>Cool!
<civodul>like was it among a bunch of k8s conda binderhub whatever talks?
<rekado>no, there’s some kind of regular seminar series
<civodul>nice
<rekado>mine was the only talk
<rekado>so I guess this means that those in attendance were actually interested to learn about it
<civodul>yes, good
<civodul>let’s see if there’s a spike of Guix usage in .de :-)
<zimoun>Do you plan to push your “slides“ somewhere? maintenance.git maybe?
<rekado>spent a little over a third of the talk to motivate reproducibility and put the different deployment traditions into perspective
<rekado>zimoun: yes, I’ll push the sources to maintenance.git some time later
<civodul>i find that spending time on the motivation rather than the solution is fruitful
<civodul>ACTION -> lunch
<rekado>zimoun: I pushed the slides to maintenance.git
<rekado>you can get a copy of the PDF here: https://elephly.net/downies/2023-dfn-slides.pdf
<flypaper-ultimat>awesome! That quote by konrad is great.
<civodul>seconded!
<zimoun>rekado: nice slides! Now, the audience is convinced that Guix rocks, for sure! :-)
<zimoun>civodul, rekado: at work, we are discussing to install 3 different OS on 3 different hardware (revamp an old cluster) for testing reproducibility and friends. The question is: which OS do you use in your lab? CentOS? Else?
<zimoun>And which linux kernel version?
<civodul>by ‘3 different OSes’, you mean 3 different GNU/Linux distros, right? :-)
<civodul>i’d recommend Guix System
<zimoun>Yes. For one, yeah maybe. There is question about proprietary drivers though. It is an old cluster and I cannot put an USB dongle as workaround. :-)
<civodul>you don’t have to, plus i doubt the server requires non-free firmware/drivers
<zimoun>What do you bet?
<zimoun>And so, I guess your lab is running Guix System on the cluster, isn’t it?
<civodul>it’s not, but the cluster predates Guix System
<civodul>only GLICID went this far, AFAIK
<civodul>i mean, i’ve installed servers in our build farms etc. and have not encountered hardware requiring proprietary firmware/drivers
<civodul>anecdotal evidence
<zimoun>Well, it appears to me already hard to convince HPC folks to install Guix on the top of any distro, so I will not try to convince them to install Guix System. Especially, when I am not personally convinced Guix System fits the constraints of cluster world. Anyway, we are drifting. :-)
<zimoun>civodul: Which OS (distro) is running on the cluster of your lab?
<civodul>old CentOS
<zimoun>Thanks. Which one? And which linux kernel version?
<civodul>CentOS 7, Linux 3.10
<civodul>without unpriviliged user namespaces, etc.
<civodul>the hacker’s dream!
<civodul>(no)
<zimoun>:-) Thanks.
<PurpleSym>civodul, rekado: I added webhooks for guix-cran, guix-science and guix-science-nonfree.
<civodul>PurpleSym: coolio, thank you!
<rekado>PurpleSym: thank you!
<rekado>on our cluster it’s also CentOS 7 with what they call Linux 3.10.
<rekado>(patched beyond recognition)
<rekado>I think they are committed to using a RHEL variant because they decided on proprietary storage(!)
<rekado>so they need to be able to install proprietary kernel extensions (GPFS), and since IBM provides pre-built packages only for Debian and RHEL they pick RHEL: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/gpfs/4.1.0.4?topic=gpfs-software-requirements#linsoft
<rekado>proprietary firmware and drivers is not an obstacle to using Guix System; you’d just use a different kernel
<rekado>*third-party* proprietary stuff is a bigger obstacle
<rekado>but when your cluster depends on third-party proprietary modules you’ve already lost control over the design of your cluster anyway.
<rekado>I’m looking for inspiration for the upcoming workshop. It’s supposed to prepare participants to contribute to Guix, so we’ll go through parts of the contribution workflow and play with channels.
<rekado>for your past workshops do you have any materials (e.g. exercises or steps) you could share?