Re: [9fans] arm platform with sata and multiple nics

[Shane Morris <edgecomberts@gmail.com>]

Hiro, our OP might want to do some routing or other related tasks using Plan 9? Random "war stories" that could be clues for OP ensue...

I'm not vouching how suitable this all is, but your comment "one NIC plus a GigE switch" made me think Hiro. I'm pretty certain we don't have "nice toys" like MPLS and all that cool cat stuff that become big in the days of the Commindico IP transit network here in Oz, the first real nationwide backbone IP network to compete with Telstra (the Big T had been deregulated and sold by the Howard Government a few years beforehand, but no one had gotten around to knocking the Big T off their perch - until Commindico, circa 2002 - 2003 iirc).

Anyway, me as PFY linesman in 2004, had to do some minimal Cisco stuff, MPLS was mentioned, usual sales pitch, whatever. Cisco sucks the big one, by the way, but that's just me. I'm into UBNT gear these days, but I get a great sales pitch, and neat wholesale tacked on the back of a WISPs orders. Family is great, especially adopted family.

My idea, subject to it physically working in the Plan 9 stack and whatnot for OP using your suggestion Hiro is to hook up said Plan 9 box to router of type to be a little smarter than the average router, which gets around some of your "routing issues" I'd imagine the OP might want to play with.

https://routerboard.com/CCR1009-8G-1S-1Splus

You start partitioning your bandwidth in this case, and from a Pi you've got barely 100Mbit off the Ethernet interface, and the single USB PHY feeding all your USB devices and the Ethernet, even on the ARM64 Pi3, although I am hoping Eben got with the program and got rid of his little bug in the silicon in the USB PHY, I had a few issues with it working tech for the Uni's in Sydney building CubeSat components back when. Model A+ spec gear. Lucky for me, I strapped the FPGA card on through the SPI interface, and had a bit of SDRAM buffering what was coming off my acquisition gear. You avoid Pi USB issues when you have an ARM board with a dedicated MAC+PHY, usually swings off some adaption of the MII gear that hung off the back of Sun SPARCs into Thicknet transceivers back when, just without the thick chunk of multicore copper between system and transceiver. Evidently OP knows a trick or two, and yes, you're right.

I mention all these anecdotes for your entertainment. If Plan 9 runs on this Kickstarter board, sweet as, I'll buy one eventually. I was going to try to get one of the boards from the German guy, the one with the funny Japanese name, and the Zynq CPU... Then I lost my job, went completely broke, moved up North, and am now trying to work on farming dairy goats.

That's a long story for another time kids.

Almost final thought - I've wanted to play with this MikroTik gig I linked after I first saw it at the adopted family members place I refer to above, in his little data centre for the WISP. Took down a model number, Googled it, a bit like the Parallella gear I was playing with six months to a year before I lost my job, and had to move up North. I had always thought the Epiphany chip would be good for a Plan 9 or better yet, an Inferno port, again, story for another time. The CPU on the Parallella is the same Zynq ARM+FPGA on the funny Japanese name board. The Tilera CPU in the MikroTik I refer to is similar, all RISC spec crap, grid stuff, all GCC toolchains. Strap a MII IP core in a Zynq FPGA, wire to MAC+PHY chip? Second LAN then? Could do a SATA interface similar, don't know what you'd spring for an IP core. More than a mortal such as I? I've been out of this for almost two years, I know nearly squat these days.

PS - I once asked Mr Stallion about a port to of Plan 9 to the Dragino. Technically quite possible, financially not my gig. That could've got you out of trouble OP, use ARM board for CPU horsepower, squirt through wifi/ dual routed LAN on Dragino. No hard feelings Steve, I wish I'd had the money, there's new Dragino gear out, ones an outdoor VoIP endpoint, like the Aussie Rowetel stuff was supposed to be.

Apologies for hijacking thread with barely, struggling to be relevant, thoughts. War stories from too many years doing... Think I was drunk for a lot of it? Oh well.

Enjoy!

Sent from my iPad

> On 4 Oct 2016, at 19:06, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "multiple nics"
> 
> no, just one NIC and a gigabit switch.
>