sparc fileservers

[Mike Haertel mike@skinner.cs.uoregon.edu]

>| Yes, it should work on an IPC or SLC.  We currently use an IPC as the
>| fileserver here.  You need the patches that were sent out a while back,
>| however, for it to work.
>
>The catch, of course, is that one needs a working system in order to
>install the patches. :-)

Not so.

You need a working Plan 9 terminal, but not necessarily a working
file server.

You can boot the terminal kernel directly off the Plan 9 cdrom.
Set up a unix based file server (using u9fs) on some machine
with lots of disk.

Mount the Unix system somewhere in the heirarchy (e.g., /n/kremvax
is included as a possible mountpoint on the cdrom.)

Copy the kernel sources to the Unix server.
Modify them according to the patches.
Compile, and build.

In fact, we have Plan 9 running here at UO using only the Unix
based file server, since right now there are no spare machines
to dedicate a Plan 9 file server.

Note that there were a few bugs in u9fs as originally distributed,
but Rob sent some patches out around March or April for fixing them.