[9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Roman Shaposhnick <rvs@sun.com>]

Just the other day I've been having this hallway conversation where
I tried to make Plan9 sound as a solution to all the problems 
(excluding world's hunger, perhaps) and the question that made
me write this email and humbly ask for your ideas was this:
"Well, it seems that Plan9 is really good about making *use*
of resources, but how does it help you *discover* them?".

Well, I, for one, didn't know how. Of course we have stuff 
like ndb(6) (and DNS) but that's not a "resource discovery" 
worth writing home about. srv(4) comes closer to facilitating
it, but, alas only within a particular server.

I guess my question is -- is there any research going on
on how Plan9's philosophy could lend itself to this problem?
Any ideas ? Implementations ? Anything ? :-)

It's not that I'm looking for something particular (rather than
having an exciting thread here :-)) so I'd appreciate all
the feedback.

Thanks,
Roman.