Re: [9fans] have installed plan 9 on many hosts, can't get any of them to "share".

[John Floren <slawmaster@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Lloyd Caldwell <lmc@xmission.com> wrote:
> 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

If you follow the standalone CPU installation instructions on the wiki
to the letter, you will have a cpu/auth/file server. It's then easy to
export fossil to clients, just set up the configuration to listen on
the appropriate port (the document you want is linked from the
standalone instructions).

Then, once you've got that set up, you install a terminal on another
machine. When it asks for a root, say "tcp" then give it the IP for
your standalone server when it asks. Boom, your terminal now has
remote root. You'll probably want to configure /lib/ndb/local to keep
track of all your systems...

Configuring PXE isn't that tricky but I don't want to run through the
setup process right now, let me know if you need a rundown.

Basically, "> Where might I go for a walk thru in setting up a simple
plan9 installation one cpu/auth/fs and one terminal?" is answered by
"Use the standalone install instructions... and that's basically it."

If you'd give us the errors you're seeing from cpu, we might be able
to help. "Weird errors" isn't very informative!

If it comes down to it, I can exchange some of my config files with
you. I have a standalone cpu server running, with PXE boot working.


John