Help needed with PC installation

[Steve Kotsopoulos steve@ecf.toronto.edu]

corey@hotrod.alph.att.com wrote:
> 	1) The documentation refers to the CD-ROM or floppy installations
> 	   on a PC as a "complete" Plan9 system. My confusion comes

Options 1 (floppy) and 2 (CDROM) set up a stand-alone machine.
If you only install the floppies, you get a stripped-down system.
The CDROM makes a complete system possible. To quote install.html:

: The CD-ROM contains a single ISO-9660 file system.
: That file system is the complete Plan 9 distribution, structured
: as it will be after you install it.

> 	   from the part of the documentation that asks me not to install
> 	   a password on my personal account, as the Authentication Server
> 	   has not been set up yet. Must I set my Plan9 installation up
> 	   to be all three? (file server, cpu server, authentication server)?

If you are using a single system, you can't really have a 'full system'.
The file server kernel is quite distinct from the terminal/cpuserver
kernel - they cannot co-exist. kfs is a local-only file system used
(mostly) for standalone systems.

> 	2) The CD-ROM installation is missing the /usr/none directory as
> 	   pointed out in the documentation. The document proceeds to
> 	   instructs the user on how to fix the problem by creating the
> 	   /usr/none directory and then copying in the files. This procedure
> 	   fails with "permission denied" if I try to create the /usr/none
> 	   directory, while logged in as "tor". Do I need to execute
> 	   "disk/kfscmd allow" first? or should I just add the "none"
> 	   account the same way I added my own account?

The kfs /usr directory is owned by 'none', so 'tor' cannot write to it.
By running 'disk/kfscmd allow', you turn off permission checking,
which allows you to create/delete/read anything.
Quoting from the installation guide again:
: For each user name to be established on the file system, run the command
:    /sys/lib/kfsuser username
: This will do all the necessary work to establish a basic Plan 9 environment
: for that user.  You might even take a look at the command to see how it works;
: it's an rc(1) script.

If you look at the script, you'll see that it does a 'disk/kfscmd allow'
near the beginning, and a 'disk/kfscmd disallow' at the end.

You could try running '/sys/lib/kfsuser none', but I'm not sure if that
will complain because 'none' is already in /adm/users.