Re: [9fans] AUTH, FS, etc.

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 04:49:39PM +0900, okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:
> 
> Anyway, probably Lucio may have two different auth/cpu servers for relase
> 2 and 3.  In that case, he should change the auth ID for those two servers.
> In our site, original Auth server has the ID of bootes, it was named when
> I was not fully understand the network nechanism of Plan 9(about 5 years ago,
> wah, time passes so quickly).  :-)
> 
That makes perfect sense.  Do you think two AUTH servers are necessary?
I'm tempted to run everything off the 2ed CPU server, but install a
second CPU server - without AUTH - for drawterm's benefit (yes, you
may call me a philistine :-)

I've also successfully installed the 3ed release on the 2ed file
server and it seems capable of supporting a 3ed nearly diskless
workstation quite reasonably (it did reboot without explanation,
except that it was doing that regularly as late as day before
yesterday because of power problems, so I'll leave panicking till
later).

> I also recommend Lucio that for release 2 you may have only b.com in
> your boot floppy and use bootp for downloading its kernel from release 2 
> file server.  On the other hand, for release 3, you should have the kernel 
> in your boot floppy.  This is somewhat tricky though.
> 
I wonder what the actual capabilities are.  I'd like a middle path
between my understanding (or lack thereof) of b.com and 9load.  I'd
like the kernel to be booted off the net, but the necessary
information to come from the DHCP server, ISC's until I have a really
stable, self-initiating Plan 9 network.  At this point, the fileserver
can boot first, but then I need BOOTP on my NetBSD server to kickstart
the 2ed CPU/AUTH server.  This clashes with needing DHCP for the
workstation as well as other machines on the network.  It is a little
galling, because I'm sure it would not be hard to tidy all this up.
But I am making some progress.

> I'm not sure this may work for Lucio, because I don't know his network.
> 
I run two NetBSD servers, a WinNT server on a multiboot machine
shared with MS-DOS and Win95, my workstation is a diskless (RARP
and BOOTPARAMS eventually providing NFS) NetBSD X-server, but nearly
ready to run as a 9-term if I get daring.

I have a machine on which I installed Plan 9 3ed, then a 2ed CPU/AUTH
server with a small IDE disk drive (I mean small, 40Meg) and a 2ed FS
with two disks: main is 2ed jumbled up variously, other is 3ed,
already not so pristine.

A last NetBSD box is my gateway to the Internet (slow analogue leased
line to a client with a faster link) and, last, I have a Netware
server, version 3.11 which I have not used since Y2K for various
reasons.  Altogether a rather confused research laboratory.

Oh, I also have a soldering iron, and I _do_ know which side is hot
:-)

++L