Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

> continue to be used only for specialized domains(Question: how plan9 is
> used as Bell-Labs and for what type of jobs? There isn't much information
> about its real world usage).

At the labs, its used as a development system for approximately 8 people.
It used to be a bigger crowd but Lucent, and to a lesser extent our lab,
has shrunk a lot over the last 3 years.

To a larger community (50 people) it is their main web server (about
100000 hits a day).

It is a mail server to yet a different subset of our lab, using imap
and pop3, as well as to those of us who use plan9 exclusively.  We depend on it
as our DNS server for cs.bell-labs.com and as the DHCP server for a handful
of networks (100 systems or so).  There are currently 3 large file servers,
about 10 CPU servers of various flavors (about half of them multiprocessors
of 2 to 16 cpus), and a few dozen terminals.

It is the authentication server used by both Unix and Plan 9 systems
so that people can use their netkeys (+ssh for example) to get into the
company from the outside internet.

We're using it as the embedded OS in telephony things we do in the lab.
For example, an encrypted home ethernet bridge, and a wireless base station.

And, of course, its still our music jukebox.

Given all that, if we had to make a business case for Plan 9, the company
would probably force us onto Windows for living and Linux for an embedded
OS.  In fact, they're on the campaign trail again to move the whole
company onto an environment that's cheaper for them to support.  We'll
survive that because we do things they can't (like DNS hacks, IP
protocol stack hacking, etc) but they'll take away some of users that
don't hack kernels.  It gets harder and harder to do business with the
rest of the company unless you live 100% of the time on the same Windows
OS that they use.   We see the ratcheting effect of proprietary tools
and formats, especially when the company decides on a single solution and
feeds it to the majority of employees.

While I'm happy about links, it doesn't really solve many of my problems.
It simply can't deal with the (ever changing) Microsoft based web environment
that Lucent has.  I have windows of time when the latest and greatest
mozilla/netcape can but those windows close over time (Firebird is currently
holding its own but I'm already seeing fraying at the edges).
We have a couple of NT and XP systems in our lab just so we can walk over,
log on, and deal with corporate administrative stuff every now and then.
A better multiuser version of VNC on windows would go a long way to
making life bearable on that front.

There's also the constant friction caused by not using the solution of the
day for embedded systems.  It used to be only Vxworks.  Now its slowly opening
up to Linux because its the flavor of the week at IBM and Lucent looks at
IBM as the model of a reincarnated big company.  The GPL scares management
somewhat which acts as a damping force.