Re: [9fans] Is 9Fans dead or alive

[Nickolas Peter <nickpeteromalley@gmail.com>]

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Hi Brantley,

I am by no means an experienced developer or Plan 9 user, so I can hardly
speak from the same experience level as most (I assume) of the posters on
this list. I only recently found myself very interested in Plan 9, C, and
embedded systems. As of now, I only run 9front as a learning environment
on series of virtual machines.

It's really intriguing to hear that there's commercial hardware running
Plan 9, and very motivating to see that there are still people utilizing
Plan 9 in some way as a primary system.

When you mentioned using Plan 9 in your shipping software, were you
referring to some internal software that you use to handle shipping
hardware to customers, or software that you sell to customers (say, to run
on your hardware)? I'm interested to hear more about it, if you're at
liberty to share.


Nick


On Wednesday, August 24, 2016, Brantley Coile <brantleycoile@me.com> wrote:

> Some general comments.
>
> It’s good to see it used in at least a few places. It’s too good a system
> to be the only one using it. But I will until providence completely forces
> me to do otherwise, which I don’t anticipate.
>
> I’m really lucky to be able to use the system, especially in the way it
> was envisioned in the 1980’s. My first knowledge of it was when I asked
> Dennis Ritchie what was new. He said that Ken was playing around with the
> concept of union directories. Later, during one of my visits to the Labs,
> in 1988 I think, Dennis gave me a demonstration of the system.
>
> One problem with most people who haven’t been as fortunate as I have, is
> they really just need a single system, not a distributed system. While Plan
> 9 makes a better single system for some things than most OSes, it’s really
> not supposed to have local disks at all. It really is designed to be a
> larger distributed timesharing system. At Coraid, we had two setups, one in
> Athens and one in Redwood City, that supported over 100 users in total. And
> without a single dedicated system admin. It was a very part time job,
> mostly for Erik, but Ian Ennis did some as well. It was very easy to manage
> because it was a single machine.
>
> As far as I know, SouthSuite is now the only company both using it as a
> development system or shipping software based on Plan 9. Does anyone know
> of any others?
>
> Different people choose tools for different reasons and to satisfy
> different requirements the world places on them. I chose to work in
> embedded appliances so I could pick the software I use. The PIX Firewall
> was a bit too early for Plan 9—it was not yet released when I wrote the
> PIX—but it was very much of the spirit, as was the Cisco LocalDirector.
> Soon, we began using the 1995 Plan 9 release and I have been using it
> almost exclusively ever since. I use it as the sole development environment
> and as the base of the products we ship.
>
> In spite of our early success at Coraid with the SR, after the VC
> investment the use of Plan 9 became controversial. It’s not what others
> use, and in Sand Land (what else can one call Silicon Valley) that makes
> people nervous. Over my objections, the company attempted to move to Open
> Solaris. It’s a truism that a company that changes operating system goes
> out of business, and Coraid, Inc. again proved that to be true. The reason?
> A small company can’t afford the retooling costs to switch to another
> operating system.
>
> But things have turned out well anyway, at least for me and the
> traditional Coraid users. Now I have everything from the trademark to the
> source code and now offer the Coraid product as a software product and can
> support existing Coraid users, both with software updates and with help
> getting their hardware fixed or replaced. We are helping all those folks
> who bought Coraid gear continue to get value of their purchase. One fellow
> sent me a note showing that he’s been up over 2,000 days without rebooting.
> There’s never a reason to fork-lift an SR.
>
> I like to think we do a good job, but our performance, efficiency and low
> cost is all made possible by the superior system that was developed by the
> folks at the Labs from 1987 thru 2002.
>
>   Brantley
>

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