I have some good progress finally. I started from scratch and pulled the latest from git. I am now running guix-daemon as root with only one option --no-substitutes. The make guix-binary* ran for hours and built a lot of stuff (bash, gcc, perl, etc) but stumbled upon openldap which doesn't seem to be available at the url it wants to use:
building path(s) `/shared/shape_tier3/common/local/guix/store/50l6s098sy4ig2irjm1g4c8y261nxzfc-openldap-2.4.40.tgz'
ERROR: In procedure getaddrinfo: Name or service not known
I tried modifying gnu/packages/openldap.scm to use correct url (
ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/OpenLDAP/openldap-release/...) but that didn't change anything since (I am guessing) the .drv files in store weren't rebuilt and still point to the old url. How do I fix that without rebuilding everything that it created so far?
As a side note, would it be possible to modify the files you suggested (gnu packages package-management and gnu system instal) for the custom local state dir in such a way (through configure? scheme variable?) that it wouldn't be hard-coded? I am guessing any update to guix would cause my changes to be lost?
Thanks,
Alex