From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 11:27:08 +0200 From: Lucio De Re To: hyena@interport.net, 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Remote access Message-ID: <20000821112708.C290@cackle.proxima.alt.za> References: <39A0CD77.9FF3877A@interport.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <39A0CD77.9FF3877A@interport.net>; from Chris Drelich on Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 09:00:10AM +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: fde58606-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 09:00:10AM +0000, Chris Drelich wrote: > > 1) What are ways for plan9 to be accessed remotely, specificly by machines that > do not run Plan9? Can one telnet or ssh into a plan9 system from a > unix/windows/mac system? > I find drawterm awesome. You'll have to read about it and try it, but you can take my word for it that the concept is very, very good. The implementation is flawed in almost clownish ways, although it is very stable (what I mean is that when something does go wrong, I find the behaviour quite amusing: under Linux/KDE, for example, it seems to cause arbitrary sessions to close; I can't quite put my finger on it because I have too many sessions active :-( Drawterm itself seems either to freeze or continue unperturbed. > 2) I understand that the OS uses RIO. If one was to say ssh into a plan9 > system, could one use the system without RIO? I understand that a lot of > applications would not work without RIO. However, for minimum remote access > from a non-plan9 machine, a few applications could be compiled with APE for use > only from this form of remote access. > Telnet works, but lack of cursor addressing in typescripts means that many of the fundamental applications are inaccessible, not unlike windows, I guess. There's enough Unix in there to manage the remote host, but it is a tight fit. Ssh and remote execution are possible, in fact fundamental to Plan 9's distributed processing model. But drawterm again obviates this drawback quite successfully. > 3) If it is impossible to ssh or telnet into a plan9 system from a non-plan9 > system, how much work would it take to make this possible? Would anyone else > be interested in this? > It is contrary to the Plan 9 philosophy to add cursor addressing to typescript terminals. I guess it could be done, but the gain would be far smaller than the effort required; there are naturally better ways. And the Plan 9 philosophy tends towards providing the presentation on the client workstation, so your approach is really a reversal of this philosophy; you'd be swimming against the tide. On the other hand, compute intensive tasks with simple interfaces are very readily adapted to remote execution on compute servers. ++L