> I don't think I ever had a reason for that assumption beyond laziness and > craziness.
Not so crazy. RTFMing in Plan 9 requires close attention - minimalist style means every word matters. The clue is in ndb(6): Ndb/cs can be made to perform such network aware searches by using metanames in the dialstring. A metaname is a $ fol- lowed by an attribute name. Ndb/cs looks up the attribute relative to the system it is running on.