Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[Thaddeus Woskowiak <tswoskowiak@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 7, 2024 at 6:22 PM Shawn Rutledge <lists@ecloud.org> wrote:
>
> On May 7, 2024, at 2:14 AM, sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de> wrote:
> > In the other case, where you want your machine to always serve services, that machine is most probably a cpu by definition. Nowadays there's no reason to not run a cpu if you need services. In the beginning there were different kernels if I remember correctly, which meant a big difference, but nowadays it's only a different configuration.
>
> I just don’t see much point in keeping it as split as it still is.  For some reason a 9front install is a term by default, and not being set up to run services by default seems like a needless limitation.

Why is learning to setup a cpu server needless?

> But if you switch to cpu, it’s a little extra work to get it to be a useful machine to sit in front of (even though “text mode” is already graphical), which is also a needless limitation.

termrc

> It took me a few hours to learn how to customize the startup process at first, and I didn’t memorize it, so next time I’d have to look at the machines on which I already did it to remember what exactly I did.

This track explains everything:
https://kmfdm.bandcamp.com/track/anarchy-god-and-the-state-mix

>  When a newbie starts with one machine and then wants to try starting up network services shortly afterwards, it should be more directly possible, IMO; and the directory-of-services approach seems like a good one to me, which should not be ruled out by having a term by default.

What stopped you from using listen or even listen1 in termrc? Do you
think that setting cpu cripples things? Its just an env variable the
bootrc script uses to see wtf it is supposed to do. read through
boot(8)

> Unless you are actually in a lab environment with shared machines, nobody expects a diskless terminal anymore; and it’s not a great introduction to what Plan 9 can do, to have that be the default.

All of my plan 9 machines are tcp or pxe booted diskless terminals
unless they are a laptop or my cpu/disk server. I guess my house is a
lab - Ozone Labs, est. 2018. It's dumb to want a building scattered
with disks holding duplicate data - one disk to rule them all, one
command to bind(1) them. If the terminal goes bad I throw it away and
plug a new one in, change the ether= in ndb and move on with life.
Testing a new machine? just plug it in and setup ndb. Gigabit and 10gb
are really cheap and you wont notice you don't have a disk in the
machine.

> If the majority thinks there needs to continue to be a distinction though, then maybe the installer should ask about the machine’s intended role at installation time, and try to achieve a suitable out-of-the-box experience for all the choices.

You can do anything with a terminal install, which by default is a
newbie friendly experience, including turning it into a graphical
cpu/disk/terminal/router/networking thing. Its so damn simple to
achieve these things that I cant believe I am wasting my time writing
this. RTFM over and over, because you learn by listening. Later on we
will tell you how to setup a cpu server just as you would in any
colorful German operating system.