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Is multi user nix safe? (mander.xyz)
submitted 3 months ago by 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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[–] [S] 1 point 3 months ago

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.

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