Re: [9front] Staying up-to-date

[Thaddeus Woskowiak <tswoskowiak@gmail.com>]

>     That's an idea, indeed. Seen it in the FQA.
>
>     Although I'm quite familiar with PXE, BOOTP and DHCP due to my work
>     on Linux embedded systems for ~25y, I'm not when it's related to
>     Plan9 and I find the documentation hard to follow -_-;
>
>     It seems to be Plan9-fileserver oriented (obviously).
>

It's very easy. So easy that once you get it working you will want to
throw all but one of your hard drives out the window. Follow
https://fqa.9front.org/fqa6.html#6.7

I also wanted to say that when it comes to learning Plan 9 from a
Linux/*nix background you will find that Plan 9 will appear obtuse and
difficult. That is because you have only known obtuse and difficult so
you have come to expect it. Plan 9 is the opposite - so much so that
it appears alien to the beginner.

>     In the mean time I was looking at `man 8 fs` and found that the
>     fs "check" command could be used to check for a filesystem
>     integrity. But it's nowhere to be found on the console (in the
>     current state of my research).
>

fs is the now deprecated classic on-disk file server for plan 9. The
two currently supported file systems on 9front are hjfs and cwfs.
There is a third, an amazing piece of work by Ori called gefs, which
is in testing right now. Read the man pages for those supported file
systems and you will see the relation to fs.

Plan 9 (the kernel) only speaks 9P. It doesn't understand on-disk file
systems such as hjfs or cwfs as that is the job of the disk file
servers cwfs(4) and hjfs(4) - programs which translate the on-disk fs
to 9P. This means you could in theory boot from ext, nfs, cifs, sshfs,
etc.

>     I also wanted to know which filesystems where mounted and couldn't
>     find it in the man pages of the commands specified in the
>     unix2plan9 wiki page. Thanks to fshalt I found out that the root
>     filesystem was hjfs :)
>

Plan 9 does not have mounts in the Unix sense as mounts and binds are
per namespace. Instead you use the ns(1) command which prints a list
of commands which represents the construction of the namespace that rc
process is running in. That namespace is inherited by children procs
which is why mounting/binding something in a new Rio window does not
effect other windows BUT performing that same mount before running Rio
does. See namespace lifting in the wiki for a global mount solution
and read about srv(3).

>     Even though I've been playing occasionally with Plan9 and then
>     9front for ~10y, I still don't feel confident enough for system
>     administration.
>

Rome was not built in a day. Take your time and ask questions. Do not
mash keys or make assumptions. Have fun!