Re: [9fans] Experiences with remote connections?

[john@csplan9.rit.edu]

>> When I read the papers, there's references to systems booting over the
>> network and even connecting via dialup. Now, I'm on cable here, and
>> unless VMware's NAT system and Qemu's -net nic -net user options
>> really suck (do they?), I just can't see the feasibility of such a thing.
>> Can anyone else share experiences with connecting to Plan 9 from
>> hundreds/thousands of miles away with something other than
>> drawterm?
>
> plan 9 is not really intended to boot terminals
> off a file server hundreds of miles away unless
> you have a really fast connection.
>
> however, there are things you could do to
> improve your situation and see if they help.
>
> the main thing is to set up a partition for cfs(4)
> to use and then use it.  if you do this, then
> directory reads and stats and walks still go
> through to the server, but reads of cached files
> can be served locally (the qid from the walk
> response from the server lets cfs figure out
> whether its cache needs to be refreshed).
>
> to do this you need to make a partition for cfs
> to use and then set cfs=#S/sdC0/cache (or whatever)
> in your plan9.ini.  you also need to boot a terminal
> with cfs in /boot.  pcdisk does, pc does not.
>
> before you set up cfs you can test how well it
> might work by seeing how much this helps your
> lc time:
>
> 	ramfs -m /n/ram
> 	for(i in rc ls mc lc){
> 		cp /bin/$i /n/ram/$i
> 		bind /n/ram/$i /bin/$i
> 	}
> 	cd; time lc
>
> russ

ramfs seems to improve lc by about a second
or two. Still far from what I'd consider acceptable,
which is unfortunate; once a program is loaded,
it runs very nicely and responsively. Maybe it
would be more feasible simply to boot the terminal
from its own disk, then import my mailbox and
mount my fileserver to /n/csplan9 so I can access
my files.

If I could figure out how to make vncs work properly,
that might be an option. Right now, it just complains:
vncs: vncchal: needkey dom? proto=p9sk1 user?


John