From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Fri,  9 Jun 2006 16:41:46 +0200
From: Adriano Verardo <a.verardo@tecmav.com>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Diskless cpu servers
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andrey mirtchovski wrote:

> i've modified libauth to add a cmos device as nvram in the past... you
> can just go with it and not worry about sending a patch, unless you
> think it's valuable :)
>
>
The solution I found its really trivial. Instead, the problem I'm dealig 
with could be interesting
for the community.

I think that Plan9 could be effectively used in industrial automation 
systems
to coordinate leaf nodes devotes, for example, to data acquisition.
There are many situations in which real time is not a true constraint.
Thanks to the Plan9 design  it  should be  easier  to share  
information  among
graphical monitoring stations etc etc etc.

The typical scenario is: many very small (486/P100) acq. (leaf) nodes, 
mix of
new and obsolete HW, strict constraint about budget, ....

So I built a cluster of very small (chep and old) CPUs (motherboards+acq 
dev+eth)
and I'm trying to have them up and running just turning them on without 
human intervention
(they could be a lot and distributed in a large area) and downloading a 
small Plan9.

I would like not to have many customized kernels. Probably to have the
nvram info embedded in the kernel, in such a particular scenario, could be
a good solution.

I'm also looking at Plan9 as a platform for distributed computing on
a company network. Really some of my clients have networks of
hundreds of modern PCs that don't work in the night ...

But this is another story

Adriano