From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu, kma@geneseo.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Pointers for using Plan 9?
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>
Date: Thu,  5 Oct 2000 22:46:48 -0400
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	1. Sample Plan 9 setup and guidelines for decisions (I'm still
           pouring over the Overview to Plan 9 networks)

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/start.pdf is a start.

	2. Sample programs that use Plan 9 features

I think the most fundamentally Plan 9 aspect for a distributed
systems course is the easy sharing of resources.  Play around
with import, or with /mnt/term in cpu connections.

A nice demonstration is remote debugging via "import othermachine /proc".
An even better demonstration when the two machines are
different architectures.

An anecdote about remote resource sharing.
I have a private network with a few machines on it,
including a Windows box and a Linux box.  The Linux
box does not talk to the outside world, but the Windows
box can.  I wanted to ssh into the Linux box, but was
without my laptop (and thus my ssh key) and didn't even
have ssh installed on the Windows box.

I did, however, have my ssh key on another Plan 9 server,
accessible via the internet.  Without any encryption
software on the Windows box, I had no way to securely
get the ssh key.  Instead, I started up drawterm (a program
that pretends to be a Plan 9 terminal calling a cpu server)
and connected to the server with the ssh key.  Then I
ran ssh on the remote cpu server but driving the Windows box's
TCP stack underneath:

	bind /mnt/term/net/tcp /net/tcp
	ssh 1.2.3.4

All was well, and the ssh key never left the remote server.

Russ