Have you considered using AoE (Coraid)? It would require dedicated fossil,
NFS CIFS servers, but they'd all be sharing the storage -- Coraid supports
ext4 and NTFS. Most servers have multiple NICs, which makes a dedicated LAN
for AoE traffic easy.

Regarding authentication and access control, I think the only *standard*
option for a mixed OS environment (Plan 9, Linux/*BSD, Windows) is Kerberos.

It would be great if factotum could handle Kerberos 5. There is a pure Go
package (https://github.com/jcmturner/gokrb5) that could help. Of course,
this would take some work.

This setup would require 4 (or potentially only 3) machines:
  * AoE block storage
  * the KDC (MIT, Heimdal, or MS Active Directory)
  * Plan 9 file server (fossil, but also CIFS and NFS servers)
  * Linux or NetBSD file server for CIFS and NFS

-Skip

On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 10:22 PM Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> My hope is to provide a central file server that fulfills reliable
> file services to both Plan 9 and Linux as seamlessly as possible. I am
> willing to sacrifice a few Unix features, such as file links, in that
> file server, if I can dedicate it to a narrower role than to support
> the full Linux environment. In Plan 9 parlance, I only need file
> services, not computing capabilities and the file server is allowed to
> limit some of the computing needs involved (like, say, graphics, any
> multimedia stuff, even mouse use).
>
> The question, then, is what file service will satisfy these needs,
> including access control, automatic backup as provided by default
> under Plan 9, etc. I am not very fond of Linux's propensity to need
> daily upgrades, but Plan 9 has quirks of its own, which I would be
> hard pressed to enumerate here, but we are all aware of.
>
> Lucio.
>
>