setting up u9fs server [was Does Plan9 support NCR53c810 ?]

setting up u9fs server [was Does Plan9 support NCR53c810 ?]

[Steve]

"H.-P. Guenther" <arnulf@arnulf.dialup.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Well, some time ago I've read that you can make a Unix box to a
> dedicated Plan9 file server and hook up several Plan9 workstations
> onto the same Ethernet as the file server.  Is this still supported?
> I glanced through the web pages at ftp://plan9.att.com/plan9/* and
> couldn't find any hints on that.  What I have here is a Unix box and a
> Pentium connected via Ethernet, and I wonder if that would be
> possible.  And how would I go about it?
> 
> [ The program u9fs is still supplied, so you can export Unix filesystems
> to plan 9. The difficulty is how to set up the authentication -- mod ]

With the new release, this is easier to do than in the past.

First, you must compile and install u9fs on a Unix system.
I used a spare disk, mounted as /plan9, and have 'u9fs /plan9' in inetd.conf
to run u9fs chrooted to the empty disk.  Also note that you must copy
/etc/passwd and /etc/group and /etc/hosts.equiv to /etc under the chroot area.
The /plan9/etc/passwd should have entries for bootes and none.
The /plan9/etc/group should have entries for bootes, map, doc, font and none.
The /plan9/etc/hosts.equiv should have an entry for your PC.
/plan9 should be writable by user 'none', for the install process.

As someone has already pointed out, a real plan9 file server will give you
better performance ... so you'll want to run u9fs on the system holding the 
disk (NOT on an NFS client) or performance will be even worse since you'll
be going through 2 distributed file systems.

Next, boot up the PC plan9, and follow the directions for
"3b. Install CD-ROM to network file server"; give it the address of your
Unix u9fs server as the file server, and choose the option which says
you will be using a TCP file server. At that point, you should check the
u9fs logfile, to see that you don't get any error messages.
If all goes well, you should see a scrolling window listing all the files
as the get copied from the CDROM (this step took 4 hours & 400Meg for me).

After you've done that, it's time to setup your network database and boot
up your terminal, telling it to use tcp to connect to the file server.
Since user 'none' shouldn't own any files, you should chown all the files
to 'adm' or 'sys'.

For authentication, setup a cpu server using the TCP file server
... which I plan to do this week (barring further interruptions),
or you could try the Unix authentication server recently announced here.

	Steve