Re: [9fans] standalone cpu server wiki

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

> - fossil is not robust yet. (isnt it a bit uncommon in plan 9 world?)

I think it is now as robust as kfs, which I never considered very robust.  We're
now running everything in our lab off of fossil.  We did have to fix a spate of
problems over the last month to get it there though.  There's also a lost block
problem that we haven't found, i.e., blocks that should get reused but don't.

> - when you choose fossil during installation, plan 9 prepares fossil file
> server and uses it. you need to setup venti and use it as the backend
> later on manually. the moment you run 'snap -a', fossil can no more work
> on its own. it has flushed its data blocks to venti. so, venti is needed
> from now on. you may be better off if venti is in another machine. if it
> is in the same machine, you must have configured it properly so that venti
> can be used at runtime. plan 9 server may not boot if the machine is
> configured to get a dynamically allocated address from a pool of IP
> addresses from a DHCP server, is there is any misconfiguration. localhost
> may be used but one needs to explicity configure it. (cant we make it
> default?)

You don't need to set up venti.  What you set with fossil only is the same
as you get with kfs only; a not backed up file system.  I don't want to
make venti automatic yet because its still problematic.  I'ld rather
people have to know what's going on to set that up.

I also dislike the fact that 'snap -a' makes fossil totally dependent
on venti.  We used to have our main fossil and venti as separate machines
but this forced us to put them both on one.  Rsc, jmk, and I have talked
about putting a 'venti cache' on fossil that would keep enough state
to run standalone.  That would take a lot of thought though.

>
> - we must remove fossil from installation option as a new user may find it
> very difficult.

Actually, I'm going to take out kfs.  We don't need two in the installation
and kfs is the one that's falling behind.

>
> - change installation procedure in such a way that localhost is available
> by default in 9pccpuf kernel, and fossil is configured to use it by
> default. also the installation procedure needs to mention somewhere that
> one needs to install plan 9 with kfs again and one needs to set up venti
> manually.

I thought we'ld already done that.  Perhaps it hasn't made it into the
installation cd.  I'll fix it.