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?

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 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).