> > getting your root fs over a wide-area network can be quite painful; > > you're not moving a ton of data, but the process is very > > latency-sensitive. i've not done it in a few years, but boot times of > > 5-10 minutes were not unusual. cfs(4) cut it to about a quarter that. > > > > still, what i ended up doing was booting locally with a termrc that > > connected to my file server and pulled in what i wanted. it was a bit > > extra effort to maintain, but the time difference was more than > > dramatic enough to make it worth it. > > The problem seems to be occurring *before* I authenticate myself, though, > which means the long delay isn't related to fetching from the fs, right? > I don't know much about the Plan 9 boot process, so I could be wrong.
for what it's worth: in the past I occasionally booted a machine at home from an fs at work, over cable modem + nat (wireless) router. booting took usually quite a while. this might be related to network throughput, but maybe also with speed of machine. now that I'm playing with parallels I also tried setting up a floppy image to boot from the fs at work. I boot recent 9pc.gz; the plan9.ini on the image sets auth and fs. after selecting tcp boot methode the whole process through the user/secstore passwd prompts till I get the term% prompt, took about one and half minute (wall clock timing). typing rio then and starting rio takes just a little while. this on parallels v 3 on a recent (intel) imac. timed again. 50 s from 'boot from tcp' till user: prompt, immediately after that secstore prompt, then 50 s or so till term% prompt. cable modem connection is (I think) 1024/256. regarding latency: ip/ping to the fs: 31: rtt 25969 mus, avg rtt 24092 mus ... actually, when I use drawterm from machine at work to cpu server at work the logging in might take quite a while. Axel.
