From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <32910.138.89.146.98.1074760052.squirrel@www.infernopark.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] standalone cpu server wiki From: To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 03:27:32 -0500 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Topicbox-Message-UUID: bd4dfbce-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Hi >> I am going to attempt to install a Plan 9 network with two CPU >> servers, one fileserver, and of course one terminal. I've never done >> this before, so I was wondering if anybody knew if the Wiki page for >> installing a standalone CPU server was up to date. Also is the Wiki this Wiki document is a very useful document. i have followed it a couple of times and done the installation. it works very well. >> page for "Installing a Plan 9 File Server" still relevant? The Wiki >> paged mentioned >> "that this is for a stand alone fileserver. The new (Jan 2003) Fossil >> fileserver is described in setting_up_fossil". What advantages does >> Fossil offer over what this page describes? Thanks for anybody that >> can offer advice! as andrey mentioned, fossil is supposed to be the replacement fs for kfs but i wasnt very comfortable with fossil. these are the problems i found about using fossil as file server: - fossil is not robust yet. (isnt it a bit uncommon in plan 9 world?) - when you choose fossil during installation, plan 9 prepares fossil file server and uses it. you need to setup venti and use it as the backend later on manually. the moment you run 'snap -a', fossil can no more work on its own. it has flushed its data blocks to venti. so, venti is needed from now on. you may be better off if venti is in another machine. if it is in the same machine, you must have configured it properly so that vent= i can be used at runtime. plan 9 server may not boot if the machine is configured to get a dynamically allocated address from a pool of IP addresses from a DHCP server, is there is any misconfiguration. localhost may be used but one needs to explicity configure it. (cant we make it default?) - if fossil crashes, you could clean it up and restart it with a previous snapshot from venti but to do that you have to have a small kfs filesyste= m anyway. (am i right? this is something that i guessed after much pain. i was wondering how 9fans recover the machine from a fossil crash) all said and done, fossil has attrative features. though i am using kfs now, i have reserved space for fossil in my disk and sooner or later i am going to use fossil. finally, my suggestion to 9fans is: - we must remove fossil from installation option as a new user may find i= t very difficult. OR - change installation procedure in such a way that localhost is available by default in 9pccpuf kernel, and fossil is configured to use it by default. also the installation procedure needs to mention somewhere that one needs to install plan 9 with kfs again and one needs to set up venti manually. i only hope i am right. if i am wrong please correct me. thanks dharani