[9fans] Newbie looking for pointers

["Martín Ferrari" <martin.ferrari@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I guess that this must be a FAQ; but I've already spent days googling,
reading docs, man pages, etc. and I'm still lost.

Short background: I'm an experienced (11y) Linux sysadmin, but this is
the first time I try to delve into Plan9. I want to play with it and
to explore it's possibilities in full, so I tried to create a minimal
reproduction of the decentratized scheme shown in the original P9
paper. I've installed successfully some terminals, one with
fossil+venti (which I expect to use as a file server) and a couple of
CPU servers (one following the step-by-step guide, another with a
make_cpuauth script that I found later). All of this in separate QEMU
instances connected by the VDE virtual networking to the host OS that
works as a router to the internet.

I think that networking more or less works (after a LOT of sweat), but
my main problem is that I don't know how to continue. The
documentation doesn't seem to explain how it's supposed that all this
fits together, and I couldn't find any docs on how to use fossil+venti
as a fileserver (the only page I found was for the old system).

I don't understand how the fileserver and the cpu server(s) share
authentication data, how do I setup remote booting for terminals
and/or the fileserver...


All in all, I think that I'm completely blinded to the big picture.
Anyone could give me some tips or pointers?

Thanks you a lot.

-- 
Martín Ferrari