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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
From: Lloyd Caldwell <lmc@xmission.com>
Date: Thu,  9 Dec 2010 15:53:25 -0700
Subject: [9fans] have installed plan 9 on many hosts,
	can't get any of them to "share".
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8a5c300a-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

Synopsis:
	do I give up trying to make a distributed plan 9 home network?
	Is plan 9 worth the struggle?
	The concepts are clearly superior, is it the implementation, is it
the lack of coherent/correct (imho) documentation?

Longer background:

  I noticed that the installation notes now has the statement:

	"If you find yourself reinstalling Plan 9 frequently, something is
wrong. This should not be necessary. In particular, there is no need
to give each Plan 9 system its own file system. "

This is speaking directly to me.

I have been trying to implement plan 9 in a distributed manner for a
long time (since r4 went open source).  I have plan 9 installed on
many computers but none of them allow me to share resource between
boxes.  network booting doesn't work (9pxeload aborts with exception
on all pc's, but I do see the plan 9 pxe banner).  the instructions
for setting up cpu server don't work for me (i.e.: cpu -h cpuhost -u
user yields errors that I can not decode, can't even tell which
"program" is issuing them).  the wiki documents seem to jump from
extremely complicated to extremely trivial.  I have read the
recommended reading list documents multiple times.

I have read a few plan 9 getting started web documents but they all
end abruptly.  The man pages say different things then the 9fans list
people say and the code is written by really smart people who use (to
me) un-informative variable names (please don't flame me for that
statement, you folks are the pro's and I defer to your taste in
naming, I just can't figure out what you're doing from reading the
code).

I'm not a computer scientist but in past jobs have installed/managed
many large unix, windoz, distributed systems, including source only
systems.

Should I abandon attempting to build a plan 9 distributed system?  I
just want to setup an isolated (no internet connection) home
environment.  I have written drivers for my custom devices, ported
the kernel to some arm boards, written some csg code but am tired of
sneaker net file transfer when this beast (plan9) is supposed to be
all network all the time.

Note all of my installs are on bare hardware (i.e.: no vm stuff under
linux, mac, windoz).

Where might I go for a walk thru in setting up a simple plan9
installation, one cpu/auth/fs and one terminal?

sorry for the extent of this message, frustrated and the learning
curve seems to have infinite slope.

regards
Lloyd Caldwell
lmc@xmission.com