I have been working on a couple of networking related projects, one of them being the /net filesystem on Linux kernel for the Glendix[1] project. I was however unclear on certain networking aspects of /net on pure Plan 9 / 9P networks. The question is, is there a proper document explaining and analyzing the networking aspects of using /net?
[1] http://www.glendix.org When a user mounts the /net of another computer system, (and I suppose the protocol used there also is 9P), the client essentially gains the ability to send packets out of the server's ethernet port. Hence a gateway or/and a VPN is implemented in the Plan 9 world. I understand that the main advantage is that we get to use the same userspace tools to work with files in the /net directory, without needing to know whether it is on the local system, or is a remote filesystem. It's just a brilliant and clean way of performing the same task we have done for decades using more complex sockets-based implementations. However, the absence of ipfilters / iptables means, the gateways really have no history information and no control over who is having access to either of its interfaces. That can be taken care of, if we run an extra service to provide these features, but it is no more a requirement to run a gateway. There is a mention of anonymous traffic here, which I have not been able to locate in literature. So how about if we created a, say MANET, where we used /net, and hence used 5 different nodes one after the other, each mounting the /net of the next node, and ultimately send the packet out to the Internet from the last node. Is there anything different we will see, from the networking side of things, than what we know of based on widely used implementations? Regards, -- Rahul Murmuria
