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?
If you mean Nix, the package manager, then no packages are actually installed as root. Every package is installed in the Nix store, but programs that need root privileges can’t be run by any user.
One of the (many) great things about Nix is that users don’t need root privileges to install packages.
Thank you for the explanation. Yes, I’m talking about the nix package manager, not about the operating system.
As far as I understand packages are built by less privileges users, but libraries and binaries are owned by the root user in the nix store.
https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.34/installation/multi-user.html
What I wonder is wheter this could lead to root executing untrusted code. I will have several users installing packages and I can not trust that they will check every package. Thus I’d like to know whether I can trust the system to be resilient without careful attention.