Re: [9fans] terminal + router + cable internet

[Axel Belinfante <Axel.Belinfante@cs.utwente.nl>]

> > getting your root fs over a wide-area network can be quite painful;
> > you're not moving a ton of data, but the process is very
> > latency-sensitive. i've not done it in a few years, but boot times of
> > 5-10 minutes were not unusual. cfs(4) cut it to about a quarter that.
> >
> > still, what i ended up doing was booting locally with a termrc that
> > connected to my file server and pulled in what i wanted. it was a bit
> > extra effort to maintain, but the time difference was more than
> > dramatic enough to make it worth it.
>
> The problem seems to be occurring *before* I authenticate myself, though,
> which means the long delay isn't related to fetching from the fs, right?
> I don't know much about the Plan 9 boot process, so I could be wrong.

for what it's worth:
in the past I occasionally booted a machine at home from an
fs at work, over cable modem + nat (wireless) router.
booting took usually quite a while.
this might be related to network throughput,
but maybe also with speed of machine.

now that I'm playing with parallels I also tried setting
up a floppy image to boot from the fs at work.
I boot recent 9pc.gz; the plan9.ini on the image sets auth and fs.
after selecting tcp boot methode the whole process
through the user/secstore passwd prompts till I get the term% prompt,
took about one and half minute (wall clock timing).
typing rio then and starting rio takes just a little while.
this on parallels v 3 on a recent (intel) imac.

timed again. 50 s from 'boot from tcp' till user: prompt,
immediately after that secstore prompt, then 50 s or so
till term% prompt.

cable modem connection is (I think) 1024/256.
regarding latency: ip/ping to the fs:
31: rtt 25969 mus, avg rtt 24092 mus ...


actually, when I use drawterm from machine at work to cpu
server at work the logging in might take quite a while.

Axel.