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From: Rahul Murmuria <rahul.is.also@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Subject: [9fans] Question on /net with respect to anonymity
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:17:51 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <9511f83e1003161717h602ccba9j44df591e6759a385@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

I have been working on a couple of networking related projects, one of
them being the /net filesystem on Linux kernel for the Glendix[1]
project. I was however unclear on certain networking aspects of /net
on pure Plan 9 / 9P networks. The question is, is there a proper
document explaining and analyzing the networking aspects of using
/net?

[1] http://www.glendix.org

When a user mounts the /net of another computer system, (and I suppose
the protocol used there also is 9P), the client essentially gains the
ability to send packets out of the server's ethernet port. Hence a
gateway or/and a VPN is implemented in the Plan 9 world. I understand
that the main advantage is that we get to use the same userspace tools
to work with files in the /net directory, without needing to know
whether it is on the local system, or is a remote filesystem. It's
just a brilliant and clean way of performing the same task we have
done for decades using more complex sockets-based implementations.

However, the absence of ipfilters / iptables means, the gateways
really have no history information and no control over who is having
access to either of its interfaces. That can be taken care of, if we
run an extra service to provide these features, but it is no more a
requirement to run a gateway. There is a mention of anonymous traffic
here, which I have not been able to locate in literature.

So how about if we created a, say MANET, where we used /net, and hence
used 5 different nodes one after the other, each mounting the /net of
the next node, and ultimately send the packet out to the Internet from
the last node. Is there anything different we will see, from the
networking side of things, than what we know of based on widely used
implementations?

Regards,
--
Rahul Murmuria



             reply	other threads:[~2010-03-17  0:17 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-03-17  0:17 Rahul Murmuria [this message]
2010-03-17  4:08 ` Tim Newsham
2010-03-17  7:20   ` Rahul Murmuria

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