[9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Roman Shaposhnick]

Just the other day I've been having this hallway conversation where
I tried to make Plan9 sound as a solution to all the problems 
(excluding world's hunger, perhaps) and the question that made
me write this email and humbly ask for your ideas was this:
"Well, it seems that Plan9 is really good about making *use*
of resources, but how does it help you *discover* them?".

Well, I, for one, didn't know how. Of course we have stuff 
like ndb(6) (and DNS) but that's not a "resource discovery" 
worth writing home about. srv(4) comes closer to facilitating
it, but, alas only within a particular server.

I guess my question is -- is there any research going on
on how Plan9's philosophy could lend itself to this problem?
Any ideas ? Implementations ? Anything ? :-)

It's not that I'm looking for something particular (rather than
having an exciting thread here :-)) so I'd appreciate all
the feedback.

Thanks,
Roman.

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[andrey mirtchovski]

> I guess my question is -- is there any research going on
> on how Plan9's philosophy could lend itself to this problem?
> Any ideas ? Implementations ? Anything ? :-)

i have a prototype for a resource discovery fs.  each server that
wants to participate runs a small fs which gathers ldap-like info
about the local system.  each server posts the root of that file
system to a main aggregate which is listed in ndb for the local ipnet
(domain).  a user mounts either a the node itself or all of them via
the aggregate.  aggregates themselves can be aggregated for
cross-domain resource discovery.  run 'ls' and you find out which
nodes are alive, 'cat */load | sort' and you get the one that's least
busy...

it's not anything big, but then again Plan 9 doesn't easily lend
itself to big and complex solutions for trivial problems.

andrey

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Taj Khattra]

> I guess my question is -- is there any research going on
> on how Plan9's philosophy could lend itself to this problem?
> Any ideas ? Implementations ? Anything ? :-)

nemo and gang's Plan B work perhaps?  http://b.lsub.org/ls/papers.html

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[boyd, rounin]

there is an RFC for a RLP [Resource Location Protocol].

looked like junk to me, but maybe i missed the point?

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Bruce Ellis]

inferno has virgil, tho it's rarely used in the wild.
i find it good for "anyone out there got a /dev/mathlink?".

brucee

Roman Shaposhnick wrote:

> Just the other day I've been having this hallway conversation where
> I tried to make Plan9 sound as a solution to all the problems 
> (excluding world's hunger, perhaps) and the question that made
> me write this email and humbly ask for your ideas was this:
> "Well, it seems that Plan9 is really good about making *use*
> of resources, but how does it help you *discover* them?".

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Fco. J. Ballesteros]

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The Plan 9 derivative that I'm using, which we call Plan B,
has all its services `discovered'.

For example, /bin comes from
	mount -V /bin/!$cputype /bin

BTW, this beast can also redirect some I/O devices (eg mouse)
for usage with remote machines.

☺

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From: Bruce Ellis <brucee@chunder.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:41:30 +1100
Message-ID: <41A42D1A.7090902@chunder.com>

inferno has virgil, tho it's rarely used in the wild.
i find it good for "anyone out there got a /dev/mathlink?".

brucee

Roman Shaposhnick wrote:

> Just the other day I've been having this hallway conversation where
> I tried to make Plan9 sound as a solution to all the problems 
> (excluding world's hunger, perhaps) and the question that made
> me write this email and humbly ask for your ideas was this:
> "Well, it seems that Plan9 is really good about making *use*
> of resources, but how does it help you *discover* them?".

Re: [9fans] Plan9 and resource discovery

[Fco. J. Ballesteros]

> ach server that
> wants to participate runs a small fs which gathers ldap-like info

The page in http://lsub.org/who
is gathered from different sources, and we see that as /who.
We use directories instead of other std for exporting information.
The thing seems to work well.