faking a plan9 network

faking a plan9 network

[miller]

Russ Cox <rsc@research.att.com> said:

> I copied the il17007
> file and made it il17008.  Even if I take the -a
> out of the exportfs command line, I get authentication
> errors from the 386 trying to boot, and it just 
> prints out the standard hex dump and hangs.

The protocol for connecting to an exportfs (il17007) service
is slightly different from the protocol for connecting to
9fs (il17008).  It is possible for a Plan 9 terminal to use
the kfs from another terminal (via exportfs) as its root,
but a few changes are needed in /sys/src/9/boot to make the
initial connection.

I found that approach unsatisfactory, though: the client
doesn't get proper authentication on its root (permissions
are always wrt the userid it booted with), performance is
not great because of the extra level of indirection, and the
exportfs server tends to run out of resources.

What I ended up doing was modifying kfs so that it listens
on il17008 and serves (authenticated) 9fs remotely as well
as serving the local root.

With either approach, you still need an auth server (listening
on il566) and a keyfs server (started at boot time).  Both can
run on a terminal with a local kfs (with judicious use of
'disk/kfscmd allow' while setting things up).

-- Richard Miller

faking a plan9 network

[Russ]

I understand this is a non-standard setup.  Please
bear with me.

I have a standalone Pentium Plan 9 terminal.  It runs
kfs for a file system; everything is great.
I want to make an old 386 another Plan 9 terminal.
Its connected via an Ethernet and I can boot
off disk1 from the ftp site.  I can also get it
to boot (using disk1) a kernel from the Pentium,
that is, from e!0.

The problem is that I want to have the root file
system be from the Pentium as well.  I tried giving
it il!192.168.96.11!17008 as where root is from,
and it worked to the degree that /bin/service/il17008
gets called on the Pentium.  I copied the il17007
file and made it il17008.  Even if I take the -a
out of the exportfs command line, I get authentication
errors from the 386 trying to boot, and it just 
prints out the standard hex dump and hangs.

This is probably because I don't have an auth server.
I suppose that I need to fake an auth server in 
addition to faking a file server, but I don't want
to dedicate a computer to being a cpu server (to run
auth stuff on) because all I've got are the two terminals
that both need to be able to be used as terminals. 

So does anyone have any good way to fake an auth
server on a terminal?

Thanks.
Russ