Subject: Interacting with a remote daemon

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 14:47:23 +0200

In <http://elephly.net/posts/2015-04-17-gnu-guix.html>, Ricardo notes:

  At some point I think it would make sense to enhance Guix such that
  RPCs can be made over SSH, so that explicit logging on to a management
  machine is no longer necessary.

We should see exactly how much support is needed.

Is ‘socat’ enough, as suggested in
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-02/msg00680.html>?
That means there would be no authentication, but maybe that’s acceptable
in a cluster that is isolated on its own LAN anyway.

Option #2 would be to augment (guix store) and guix-daemon so that there
is built-in support for TCP sockets, which would be slightly more
convenient.

Option #3 would be to make (guix store) SSH-capable, with Guile-SSH.
But it sounds like SSH would incur relatively high latency when
connecting to the daemon.

There remains the problem that /var/guix/profiles/per-user/$USER would
have to be writable to this to be useful.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.