[9fans] some first impressions of the 4th edition

[Mike Haertel <mike@ducky.net>]

It failed to install on two machines for me, but worked on third.
Previously the 3rd edition worked on all 3 machines.

1st failure: on an ASUS CUBX-E motherboard, with a 1.1GHz Pentium III
(100 MHz system bus).  It made it into 9load, but just after 9load
printed the first "." when trying to load 9pcflop.gz, it bombed out
with the message "bad kernel format".  Was reproducible.

2nd failure: a Toshiba Satellite 4280ZDVD laptop.  Almost immediately
after getting into 9load, it got some kind of panic related to
interrupt 14.  Also reproducible.

Success: Finally, the exact same floppy worked on an ancient ASUS
P6NP4 motherboard with a 333 MHz P6T CPU.

Ok, enough with installation woes...


After I got the 3rd system up and running and on the network, I was
startled to notice that the system magically remembered my password
the 2nd time I used ssh to log into a remote system.  Factotum(4)
in action.  But I am a bit concerned.  After all the historical
security problems associated with things like web browsers or
the Windows password manager, that "helpfully" remember passwords,
to see that in Plan 9 was actually kind of creepy.

I haven't rebooted the system yet, but I did notice that I wasn't
asked for any kind of password when I first booted the system and
logged in as Glenda, which implies that there is no reproducible
encryption key protecting any of this info.  Therefore I am
hoping that:

(1) these remembered passwords will go away when i reboot the
    machine again.

(2) the remembered passwords can never get written to disk (not
    even in swap space)