Re: [9fans] Adventures of a home user
Thanks again to everyone for all the help! I did this (thanks Andrey): ndb/cs ip/ipconfig ndb/dns -r Then I took a look at /net/ipselftab and /net/iproute. Then I pinged the gateway (thanks André) and got a response! Then I did (thanks Federico) hget http://google.com and got some hieroglyphs. Then I did http://www.gamefaqs.com/portable/ds/file/924897/46369 which is a fairly clean text file, to get something readable. It worked!
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On 04/18/2009 11:23 AM, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: Every time I have to use something like Linux or MS, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all. Possibly OT, my main beef with Linux and Windows is that they keep wanting to update themselves and the effort to manage these updates is enormous (less so with Ubuntu, but still great). With Plan 9, I find I can control the updating process and do not feel I'm leaving myself exposed whenever I do. Of course, the factors involved are very different, but I have a suspicion that with Windows and Linux one relinquishes control at too deep a level and the continual updates are a particularly visible case of this loss of control. I don't use Windows/XP that much, kids boot it off and on, because they need it per their syllabus. As for as fetching and, or applying updates to Linux and FreeBSD machines are concerned I never ever lost control. -- Balwinder S bdheeman DheemanRegistered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe)Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On 04/18/2009 11:36 AM, J.R. Mauro wrote: On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 1:47 AM, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote: Every time I have to use something like Linux or MS, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all. Possibly OT, my main beef with Linux and Windows is that they keep wanting to update themselves and the effort to manage these updates is enormous (less so with Ubuntu, but still great). With Plan 9, I find I can control the updating process and do not feel I'm leaving myself exposed whenever I do. Of course, the factors involved are very different, but I have a suspicion that with Windows and Linux one relinquishes control at too deep a level and the continual updates are a particularly visible case of this loss of control. ++L The update/installation process in Ubuntu sucks. If you try something using BSD ports or Gentoo portage, you can fine tune things and have explicit control over the update process. I don't think so, one can acquire a complete control over any common Linux distribution, can opt for tuning and, tweaking around any package build system, provided one has the knowledge and courage to do so. OTOH, I hate wasting cpu cycles on compiling each and every package from source; IMHO, building, updating and managing a FreeBSD, Gentoo and, or other so called source or meta distribution is merely a wastage of the man and machine hours. -- Balwinder S bdheeman DheemanRegistered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe)Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Adventures of a home user
On 04/19/2009 09:09 PM, Jim Habegger wrote: Eric and Anthony, thank you. I'm stepping through the Plan 9 documentation at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/documentation/index.html. As you noticed, Anthony, I missed a step in adding a new user: con -l /srv/fscons That didn't work in 9vx either, I imagine for the reasons you explained. I'm still way over my head here. For now I'll use QEMU to step through the Plan 9 documentation, and later I might use 9vx for other learning purposes. Now that I've learned to change the display dimensions, and use ctrl-alt, it's easy to switch between QEMU and my other windows. I've already created a new user. I won't push my luck tonight. I'll wait until tomorrow to try network configuration. IMHO, you need not switch between your Plan 9 installation under QEMU and 9vx; Just stick to a real Plan 9 under QEMU and this I hope will help you better learn, experiment and, or try procedures described on the wiki and other docs. I don't who and why one referred you to try 9vx, an abridged version which is far away from a real or native installation of a Plan 9 under QEMU, KVM, XEN and, or VMWare. Many a things e.g. page, gs, mail do not work out of the box as expected under 9vx as yet. -- Balwinder S bdheeman DheemanRegistered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe)Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On 04/18/2009 05:47 AM, Robert Raschke wrote: On 4/17/09, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students, teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices, homes and, or cafes and for what? At the risk (or maybe honour :-) of being branded as a rare case (I'm neither student, nor teacher, nor hobbyist), I use Plan 9 in to maintain my own network, email, web server and wiki, remote editing facility (ftpfs) and in terms tools, I use acme a lot wherever I go. I also use it as a handy way to store stuff centrally, for easy worldwide access via drawterm. I would classify myself as slightly paranoid, in that I don't really feel comfortable with letting Google have at it willy nilly. Storing stuff at home may be more prone to loss, but makes me feel better. Plan 9 satisfies my curiosity in that I can understand and learn things within it quite easily. Every time I have to use something like Linux or MS, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all. That's fine if it's for work (I get paid for that, after all), but not for my private life. Well, that's an example and a good one indeed, that's me. I need not comment much on your case, because you already have explained all the details in your own words. I like sam, acme and other development tools, no doubt Plan9 as whole is clean and good operating system and environment. Although, it is based on best techniques, but it is not the best as yet; -- Balwinder S bdheeman DheemanRegistered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe)Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On 04/18/2009 01:02 AM, Gorka Guardiola wrote: On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students, teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices, homes and, or cafes and for what? The Plan9 project started in 1980, took around 9 years to be solid enough to be usable and that too by the internal and, or lab people [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html] only. Whereas, the FreeBSD and, or Linux (though not an OS or Unix variant in a sense) came into existence later in 1993 and 1991 respectively are more popular among any other variants of Unix. That is the difference between coming up with a design an rethinking the system and just copying one and porting software already written. Linux started mostly using all the gnu stuff and copied all the design from already existing Unix things. That of course takes less than rethinking everything carefully from scratch. For example UTF. Among other things. That said what is the points of this discussions?. Use whatever you want and have fun. I use 4 or 5 operating systems for different things. One of them is Plan 9. Not only for teaching but as infrastructure For example this is the CMS for our courses: http://lsub.org/magic/group?o=ig=c And we ran several labs which runs diskless for teaching and so. This infrastructure serves hundreds of students. I can even have 100 computers running diskless with students with daily automatic incremental backups (venti) using the CMS (yes, with abaco) and compiling and running programs at the same time against one file server. Try that with *any* other operating system (and our hardware infrastructure). Then again, that may not be solid enough for you. I happen to work at a University, sorry. I also run Mac OS and use it for web browsing. Windows for several devices (like a USB sniffer) which I don't have drivers nor I do I feel like writing. Linux in my illiad ebook. And inferno/octopus for integrating all this stuff into a usable environment. And some time even others. If Plan 9 is not useful for you nor you get how it can be, good, don't use it. For me it is. Again, but that's only a rare case, sorry. I understand your sentiments well, because I also worked as a lecturer for about 4 years and I managed to setup such an environment based on Linux systems there; that's not a production deployment for any commercial and, or industrial use cases. Let me repeat that the question is/was, Who uses Plan9 in the Offices, homes and, or cafes for commercial and, or industrial application. I'm not against using, spreading, technology and, or philosophy behind Plan9, but am curious to know some solid example cases; no doubt yours is one such case though again only educational and, or research related. Please don't tell/dictate me what I should and, or should't I use. -- Balwinder S bdheeman DheemanRegistered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe)Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
sorry if I read wrong, but I thought the thread was Help for home user discovering Plan 9 not FreeBSD and Linux rule or Who uses Plan 9? On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 7:41 AM, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: On 04/18/2009 01:02 AM, Gorka Guardiola wrote: On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students, teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices, homes and, or cafes and for what? The Plan9 project started in 1980, took around 9 years to be solid enough to be usable and that too by the internal and, or lab people [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html] only. Whereas, the FreeBSD and, or Linux (though not an OS or Unix variant in a sense) came into existence later in 1993 and 1991 respectively are more popular among any other variants of Unix. That is the difference between coming up with a design an rethinking the system and just copying one and porting software already written. Linux started mostly using all the gnu stuff and copied all the design from already existing Unix things. That of course takes less than rethinking everything carefully from scratch. For example UTF. Among other things. That said what is the points of this discussions?. Use whatever you want and have fun. I use 4 or 5 operating systems for different things. One of them is Plan 9. Not only for teaching but as infrastructure For example this is the CMS for our courses: http://lsub.org/magic/group?o=ig=c And we ran several labs which runs diskless for teaching and so. This infrastructure serves hundreds of students. I can even have 100 computers running diskless with students with daily automatic incremental backups (venti) using the CMS (yes, with abaco) and compiling and running programs at the same time against one file server. Try that with *any* other operating system (and our hardware infrastructure). Then again, that may not be solid enough for you. I happen to work at a University, sorry. I also run Mac OS and use it for web browsing. Windows for several devices (like a USB sniffer) which I don't have drivers nor I do I feel like writing. Linux in my illiad ebook. And inferno/octopus for integrating all this stuff into a usable environment. And some time even others. If Plan 9 is not useful for you nor you get how it can be, good, don't use it. For me it is. Again, but that's only a rare case, sorry. I understand your sentiments well, because I also worked as a lecturer for about 4 years and I managed to setup such an environment based on Linux systems there; that's not a production deployment for any commercial and, or industrial use cases. Let me repeat that the question is/was, Who uses Plan9 in the Offices, homes and, or cafes for commercial and, or industrial application. I'm not against using, spreading, technology and, or philosophy behind Plan9, but am curious to know some solid example cases; no doubt yours is one such case though again only educational and, or research related. Please don't tell/dictate me what I should and, or should't I use. -- Balwinder S bdheeman Dheeman Registered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe) Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/ -- Federico G. Benavento
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
We can't tell you who uses Plan 9, because it is a secret and they don't want anyone to learn about their secret competitive advantage. /sarcasm (But still sadly true.) uriel On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: On 04/18/2009 01:02 AM, Gorka Guardiola wrote: On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote: Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students, teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices, homes and, or cafes and for what? The Plan9 project started in 1980, took around 9 years to be solid enough to be usable and that too by the internal and, or lab people [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html] only. Whereas, the FreeBSD and, or Linux (though not an OS or Unix variant in a sense) came into existence later in 1993 and 1991 respectively are more popular among any other variants of Unix. That is the difference between coming up with a design an rethinking the system and just copying one and porting software already written. Linux started mostly using all the gnu stuff and copied all the design from already existing Unix things. That of course takes less than rethinking everything carefully from scratch. For example UTF. Among other things. That said what is the points of this discussions?. Use whatever you want and have fun. I use 4 or 5 operating systems for different things. One of them is Plan 9. Not only for teaching but as infrastructure For example this is the CMS for our courses: http://lsub.org/magic/group?o=ig=c And we ran several labs which runs diskless for teaching and so. This infrastructure serves hundreds of students. I can even have 100 computers running diskless with students with daily automatic incremental backups (venti) using the CMS (yes, with abaco) and compiling and running programs at the same time against one file server. Try that with *any* other operating system (and our hardware infrastructure). Then again, that may not be solid enough for you. I happen to work at a University, sorry. I also run Mac OS and use it for web browsing. Windows for several devices (like a USB sniffer) which I don't have drivers nor I do I feel like writing. Linux in my illiad ebook. And inferno/octopus for integrating all this stuff into a usable environment. And some time even others. If Plan 9 is not useful for you nor you get how it can be, good, don't use it. For me it is. Again, but that's only a rare case, sorry. I understand your sentiments well, because I also worked as a lecturer for about 4 years and I managed to setup such an environment based on Linux systems there; that's not a production deployment for any commercial and, or industrial use cases. Let me repeat that the question is/was, Who uses Plan9 in the Offices, homes and, or cafes for commercial and, or industrial application. I'm not against using, spreading, technology and, or philosophy behind Plan9, but am curious to know some solid example cases; no doubt yours is one such case though again only educational and, or research related. Please don't tell/dictate me what I should and, or should't I use. -- Balwinder S bdheeman Dheeman Registered Linux User: #229709 Anu'z li...@home (Unix Shoppe) Machines: #168573, 170593, 259192 Chandigarh, UT, 160062, India Plan9, T2, Arch/Debian/FreeBSD/XP Home: http://cto.homelinux.net/~bsd/ Visit: http://counter.li.org/
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 4:14 AM, Skip Tavakkolian 9...@9netics.com wrote: ericvh stated it better in the FAWN thread. choosing the abstraction that makes the resulting environments have required attributes (reliable, consistent, easy, etc.) will be the trick. i believe with the current state of the Internet -- e.g. lack of speed and security -- service abstraction is the right level of distributedness. presenting the services as file hierarchy makes sense; 9p is efficient 9p is efficient as long as your latency is 30ms uriel and so the plan9 approach still feels like the right path to cloud computing. On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Skip Tavakkolian 9...@9netics.com wrote: Well, in the octopus you have a fixed part, the pc, but all other machines come and go. The feeling is very much that your stuff is in the cloud. i was going to mention this. to me the current view of cloud computing as evidence by papers like this[1] are basically hardware infrastructure capable of running vm pools each of which would do exactly what a dedicated server would do. the main benefits being low administration cost and elasticity. networking, authentication and authorization remain as they are now. they are still not addressing what octopus and rangboom are trying to address: how to seamlessly and automatically make resources accessible. if you read what ken said it appears to be this view of cloud computing; he said some framework to allow many loosely-coupled Plan9 systems to emulate a single system that would be larger and more reliable. in all virtualization systems i've seen the vm has to be smaller than the environment it runs on. if vmware or xen were ever to give you a vm that was larger than any given real machine it ran on, they'd have to solve the same problem. I'm not sure a single system image is any better in the long run than Distributed Shared Memory. Both have issues of locality, where the abstraction that gives you the view of a single machine hurts your ability to account for the lack of locality. In other words, I think applications should show a single system image but maybe not programming models. I'm not 100% sure what I mean by that actually, but it's sort of an intuitive feeling. [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf
Re: [9fans] FAWN: Fast array of wimpy nodes (was: Plan 9 - the next 20 years)
could you explain how raid 5 relates to sata vs sas? i can't see now it's anything but a non-sequitor. Here is the motivating real-world business case: You are in the movie post-production business and need 50 TB of online storage at as low a price as possible with good performance and reliability. 7200 rpm SATA (currently ~15¢/GB on Newegg) plus RAID narrows the performance and reliability of benefits of 15k rpm SAS (currently ~$1/GB) at a much lower cost.
Re: [9fans] FAWN: Fast array of wimpy nodes (was: Plan 9 - the next 20 years)
On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:58 AM, John Barham jbar...@gmail.com wrote: I certainly can't think ahead 20 years but I think it's safe to say that the next 5 (at least doing HPC and large-scale web type stuff) will increasingly look like this: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22504/?a=f, which talks about building a cluster from AMD Geode (!) nodes w/ compact flash storage. Sure it's not super-fast, but it's very efficient per watt. If you had more cash you might substitute HE Opterons and SSD's but the principle is the same. It's nice. We did that one a few years ago. Here is the 7 year old version: http://eri.ca.sandia.gov/eri/howto.html We've been doing these with the Geode stuff since about 2006. We are certainly not the first. The RLX was doing what FAWN did about 8 years ago; orion, about 3-4 years ago (both transmeta). RLX and Orion multisystems showed there is not much of a market for lots of wimpy nodes -- yet or never, is the real question. Either way, they did not have enough buyers to stay in business. And RLX had to drop its wimpy transmetas for P4s, and they could not keep up with the cheap mainboards. It's a tough business. ron
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On Mon Apr 20 11:04:31 EDT 2009, urie...@gmail.com wrote: We can't tell you who uses Plan 9, because it is a secret and they don't want anyone to learn about their secret competitive advantage. /sarcasm (But still sadly true.) i have a counterexample. coraid, inc. uses plan 9. it's a big competitive advantage and it's no secret. on the other hand, they don't advertise it much because nobody cares. - erik
Re: [9fans] web server
cgi is more than parsing query strings, there are at least two other variable passing mechanisms x-www-form-encoded (query string as the POST body) and multipart/form-data - the sort that's required when uploading binary stuff. Common Gateway Interface is a 36 page RFC : http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3875 My form upload decoder is here if anyone is interested http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/werc/cgilib.rc:35
Re: [9fans] FAWN: Fast array of wimpy nodes (was: Plan 9 - the next 20 years)
On Mon Apr 20 11:13:01 EDT 2009, jbar...@gmail.com wrote: could you explain how raid 5 relates to sata vs sas? i can't see now it's anything but a non-sequitor. Here is the motivating real-world business case: You are in the movie post-production business and need 50 TB of online storage at as low a price as possible with good performance and reliability. 7200 rpm SATA (currently ~15¢/GB on Newegg) this example has nothing to do with raid. if the object is to find the lowest cost per gigabyte, enterprise sata drives are the cheeper option. (it would make more sense to compare 7.2k sas and sata drives. there is also a premium on spindle speed.) the original argument was that scsi is better than ata or sas is better than sata (i'm not sure which); in my opinion, there are no facts to justify either assertion. plus RAID narrows the performance and reliability of benefits of 15k rpm SAS (currently ~$1/GB) at a much lower cost. without raid, such a configuration might be impossible to deal with. most 15k drives are 73gb. this means you would need 685 for 50tb. the afr is probablly something like 0.15% - 0.25%. this would mean you will loose 1-2 drives/year. (if you believe those rosy afr numbers.) - erik
Re: [9fans] FAWN: Fast array of wimpy nodes (was: Plan 9 - the next 20 years)
ron minnich wrote: RLX and Orion multisystems showed there is not much of a market for lots of wimpy nodes -- yet or never, is the real question. Either way, they did not have enough buyers to stay in business. And RLX had to drop its wimpy transmetas for P4s, and they could not keep up with the cheap mainboards. It's a tough business. All RLX showed was that they didn't know how to market benefits rather than nifty technology. Once again, the company with beautifully engineered products failed to understand that the decision makers who would buy the products were not engineers who loved them but people who needed education and handholding in order to understand them and overcome FUD from RLX competitors. A well-worn path. Wes
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
9p is efficient as long as your latency is 30ms What kind of latency? For speed of light in fibre optic 30ms is about 8000km (New York to San Francisco and back) in that 30ms a 3.2Ghz P4 could do 292 million instructions There's an interesting article about it in acmq queue20090203-dl.pdf - Fighting Physics : A Tough Battle http://www.maht0x0r.net/library/computing/acm/queue20090203-dl.pdf
Re: [9fans] VMs, etc.
what could we do today, but don't quite dare? a Blue Ray writer does 50Gb per disk (we're supposed to be getting one soon, so maybe I can report back about this later) ArcVault SCSI autoloading tape drives do from 9.6tb - 76tb http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_12_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_24_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_48_library.htm
Re: [9fans] VMs, etc.
what could we do today, but don't quite dare? a Blue Ray writer does 50Gb per disk (we're supposed to be getting one soon, so maybe I can report back about this later) ArcVault SCSI autoloading tape drives do from 9.6tb - 76tb http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_12_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_24_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_48_library.htm i'm not following along. what would be the application? - erik
Re: [9fans] VMs, etc.
erik quanstrom wrote: what could we do today, but don't quite dare? a Blue Ray writer does 50Gb per disk (we're supposed to be getting one soon, so maybe I can report back about this later) ArcVault SCSI autoloading tape drives do from 9.6tb - 76tb http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_12_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_24_autoloader.htm http://www.b2net.co.uk/overland/overland_arcvault_48_library.htm i'm not following along. what would be the application? - erik I realised after I posted, I snipped the thing about the Labs worm drive
Re: [9fans] VMs, etc.
2009/4/20 erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net: i'm not following along. what would be the application? Jukebox, perhaps? - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
9p is efficient as long as your latency is 30ms check out ken's answer to a question by sqweek. the question starts: With cross-continental round trip times, 9p has a hard time competing (in terms of throughput) against less general protocols like HTTP. ... http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9t=2d
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9t=2d You must have JavaScript enabled in order to use this feature. cruel irony. - erik
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
The update/installation process in Ubuntu sucks. If you try something using BSD ports or Gentoo portage, you can fine tune things and have explicit control over the update process. I don't think so, one can acquire a complete control over any common Linux distribution, can opt for tuning and, tweaking around any package build system, provided one has the knowledge and courage to do so. Yes and no. If you want to patch something, you have to build it on your own, so you lose package management support. And building your own deb package is not a great process. Plus, you have to rebuild it whenever you update. I'm not saying you can't completely control your distro, just that the package manager is inflexible and immature. USE flags give you /real/ control over packages without forcing you to step out of the package management infrastructure (i.e., you don't have to install anything locally to get a patch incorporated, and you don't sacrifice updates). You also have less namespace pollution, such as having mutt and mutt-ng in the repository. Emerge and ports also don't have a database that can only have one process using it at a time, and don't take forever to update said database. OTOH, I hate wasting cpu cycles on compiling each and every package from source; IMHO, building, updating and managing a FreeBSD, Gentoo and, or other so called source or meta distribution is merely a wastage of the man and machine hours. I wouldn't install gentoo on an older machine, but on anything I use day-to-day, the compilation time is a non-issue. There is no wastage of man-hours in managing Gentoo. That is what emerge is for. There is some wastage in CPU cycles. I never notice it (a decent machine can emerge world, watch an HD movie, and compile a Linux kernel without slowdown)
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
What kind of latency? For speed of light in fibre optic 30ms is about 8000km (New York to San Francisco and back) Assuming you have a direct fiber connection with no routers in between. I would say that is somewhat rare.
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Skip Tavakkolian 9...@9netics.com wrote: 9p is efficient as long as your latency is 30ms check out ken's answer to a question by sqweek. the question starts: With cross-continental round trip times, 9p has a hard time competing (in terms of throughput) against less general protocols like HTTP. ... http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9t=2d I thought 9p had tagged requests so you could put many requests in flight at once, then synchronize on them when the server replied. Maybe i misunderstand the application of the tag field in the protocol then? Tread tag fid offset count Rread tag count data
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
I thought 9p had tagged requests so you could put many requests in flight at once, then synchronize on them when the server replied. Maybe i misunderstand the application of the tag field in the protocol then? Tread tag fid offset count Rread tag count data without having the benefit of reading ken's thoughts ... you can have 1 fd being read by 2 procs at the same time. the only way to do this is by having multiple outstanding tags. i think the complaint about 9p boils down to ordering. if i want to do something like cd /sys/src/9/pc/ ; cat sdata.c that's a bunch of walks and then an open and then a read. these are done serially, and each one takes 1rtt. - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
I did the experiment, for the o/live, of issuing multiple (9p) RPCs in parallel, without waiting for answers. In general it was not enough, because in the end the client had to block and wait for the file to come before looking at it to issue further rpcs. On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Skip Tavakkolian 9...@9netics.com wrote: 9p is efficient as long as your latency is 30ms check out ken's answer to a question by sqweek. the question starts: With cross-continental round trip times, 9p has a hard time competing (in terms of throughput) against less general protocols like HTTP. ... http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=c9t=2d
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
For speed of light in fibre optic 30ms is about 8000km (New York to San Francisco and back) in that 30ms a 3.2Ghz P4 could do 292 million instructions i think that's just enough to get to dbus and back.
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
J.R. Mauro wrote: What kind of latency? For speed of light in fibre optic 30ms is about 8000km (New York to San Francisco and back) Assuming you have a direct fiber connection with no routers in between. I would say that is somewhat rare. The author found that from klondike.cis.upenn.edu cs.standford.edu added about 50ms to the round trip
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:35 AM, erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.comwrote: I thought 9p had tagged requests so you could put many requests in flight at once, then synchronize on them when the server replied. Maybe i misunderstand the application of the tag field in the protocol then? Tread tag fid offset count Rread tag count data without having the benefit of reading ken's thoughts ... you can have 1 fd being read by 2 procs at the same time. the only way to do this is by having multiple outstanding tags. I thought the tag was assigned by the client, not the server (since it shows up as a field in the T message), and that this meant it's possible for one client to put many of it's own locally tagged requests into the server, and wait for them in any order it chooses. It would not make sense to me to have to have a global pool of tags for all possible connecting clients. Again, this may just be my ignorance, and the fact that I've never implemented a 9p client or server myself. (haven't had a need to yet!) i think the complaint about 9p boils down to ordering. if i want to do something like cd /sys/src/9/pc/ ; cat sdata.c that's a bunch of walks and then an open and then a read. these are done serially, and each one takes 1rtt. Some higher operations probably require an ordering. But there's no reason you could do two different sequences of walks, and a read concurrently is there? - erik
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
Let me repeat that the question is/was, Who uses Plan9 in the Offices, homes and, or cafes for commercial and, or industrial application. I use plan9 at home and at work as a development environment. It is my primary desktop OS, though I do VNC onto other OSs to use more complex websites (like my bank). vote +1 -Steve
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
Tread tag fid offset count Rread tag count data without having the benefit of reading ken's thoughts ... you can have 1 fd being read by 2 procs at the same time. the only way to do this is by having multiple outstanding tags. I thought the tag was assigned by the client, not the server (since it shows up as a field in the T message), and that this meant it's possible for one client to put many of it's own locally tagged requests into the server, and wait for them in any order it chooses. that's what i thought i said. (from the perspective of pread and pwrite not (T R)^(read write).) i think the complaint about 9p boils down to ordering. if i want to do something like cd /sys/src/9/pc/ ; cat sdata.c that's a bunch of walks and then an open and then a read. these are done serially, and each one takes 1rtt. Some higher operations probably require an ordering. But there's no reason you could do two different sequences of walks, and a read concurrently is there? not that i can think of. but that addresses throughput, but not latency. - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
I thought 9p had tagged requests so you could put many requests in flight at once, then synchronize on them when the server replied. This is exactly what fcp(1) does, which is used by replica. If you want to read a virtual file however, these often don't support seeks or implement them in unexpected ways (returning one line per read rather than a buffer full). Thus running multiple reads (on the same file) only really works for files which operate as read disks - e.g. real disks, ram disks etc. -Steve
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
Thus running multiple reads (on the same file) only really works for files which operate as read disks - e.g. real disks, ram disks etc. at which point, you have reinvented aoe. :-) - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:03 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.comwrote: Tread tag fid offset count Rread tag count data without having the benefit of reading ken's thoughts ... you can have 1 fd being read by 2 procs at the same time. the only way to do this is by having multiple outstanding tags. I thought the tag was assigned by the client, not the server (since it shows up as a field in the T message), and that this meant it's possible for one client to put many of it's own locally tagged requests into the server, and wait for them in any order it chooses. that's what i thought i said. (from the perspective of pread and pwrite not (T R)^(read write).) Ah that's what I didn't understand :-). i think the complaint about 9p boils down to ordering. if i want to do something like cd /sys/src/9/pc/ ; cat sdata.c that's a bunch of walks and then an open and then a read. these are done serially, and each one takes 1rtt. Some higher operations probably require an ordering. But there's no reason you could do two different sequences of walks, and a read concurrently is there? not that i can think of. but that addresses throughput, but not latency. Right, but with better throughput overall, you can hide latency in some applications. That's what HTTP does with this AJAX fun right? Show some of the page, load the rest over time, and people feel better about stuff. I had an application for SNMP in Erlang that did too much serially, and by increasing the number of outstanding requests, I got the overall job done sooner, despite the latency issues. This improved the user experience by about 10 seconds less wait time. Tagged requests was actually how I implemented it :-) 9p can't fix the latency problems, but applications over 9p can be designed to try to hide some of it, depending on usage. - erik
Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote: Let me repeat that the question is/was, Who uses Plan9 in the Offices, homes and, or cafes for commercial and, or industrial application. I use plan9 at home and at work as a development environment. It is my primary desktop OS, though I do VNC onto other OSs to use more complex websites (like my bank). vote +1 -Steve Are you counting Inferno users? I'm about to deploy a small service via a juiced up Linksys router with the Inferno port to WRT Linux. Basically it's a more secure remote control protocol for my home network goo I'm not sure which goo it will work on yet but it should be fairly capable in terms of the plumbing to do most anything I want. I guess I could put more detail on that later. Dave
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
not that i can think of. but that addresses throughput, but not latency. Right, but with better throughput overall, you can hide latency in some applications. That's what HTTP does with this AJAX fun right? Show some of the page, load the rest over time, and people feel better about stuff. I had an application for SNMP in Erlang that did too much serially, and by increasing the number of outstanding requests, I got the overall job done sooner, despite the latency issues. This improved the user experience by about 10 seconds less wait time. Tagged requests was actually how I implemented it :-) 9p can't fix the latency problems, but applications over 9p can be designed to try to hide some of it, depending on usage. let's take the path /sys/src/9/pc/sdata.c. for http, getting this path takes one request (with the prefix http://$server) with 9p, this takes a number of walks, an open. then you can start with the reads. only the reads may be done in parallel. given network latency worth worring about, the total latency to read this file will be worse for 9p than for http. - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 1:33 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.com wrote: not that i can think of. but that addresses throughput, but not latency. Right, but with better throughput overall, you can hide latency in some applications. That's what HTTP does with this AJAX fun right? Show some of the page, load the rest over time, and people feel better about stuff. I had an application for SNMP in Erlang that did too much serially, and by increasing the number of outstanding requests, I got the overall job done sooner, despite the latency issues. This improved the user experience by about 10 seconds less wait time. Tagged requests was actually how I implemented it :-) 9p can't fix the latency problems, but applications over 9p can be designed to try to hide some of it, depending on usage. let's take the path /sys/src/9/pc/sdata.c. for http, getting this path takes one request (with the prefix http://$server) with 9p, this takes a number of walks, an open. then you can start with the reads. only the reads may be done in parallel. given network latency worth worring about, the total latency to read this file will be worse for 9p than for http. Yeah, I guess due to my lack of having written a 9p client by hand, I've forgotten that a new 9p client session is stateful, and at the root of the hierarchy presented by the server. No choice but to walk, even if you know the path to the named resource in advance. This seems to give techniques like REST a bit of an advantage over 9p. (yikes) Would we want a less stateful 9p then? Does that end up being HTTP or IMAP or some other thing that already exists? Dave - erik
Re: [9fans] Plan9 - the next 20 years
with 9p, this takes a number of walks... shouldn't that be just one walk? % ramfs -D ... % mkdir -p /tmp/one/two/three/four/five/six ... % cd /tmp/one/two/three/four/five/six ramfs 640160:-Twalk tag 18 fid 1110 newfid 548 nwname 6 0:one 1:two 2:three 3:four 4:five 5:six ramfs 640160:-Rwalk tag 18 nwqid 6 0:(0001 0 d) 1:(0002 0 d) 2:(0003 0 d) 3:(0004 0 d) 4:(0005 0 d) 5:(0006 0 d)
[9fans] Really weird SATA disk/controller issue
Hey all, That laptop that I was boasting ran Plan 9 flawlessly (minus the non-native graphics) is now exhibiting some really weird behavior. I've replaced the old Hitachi Travelstar disk (100GB / 7200RPM) with a Seagate 320GB disk (5400RPM). I can install FreeBSD and CentOS fine. When I try to install Plan 9 onto this new disk, I get really weird I/O errors now. If I try to delete labels / partitions, it goes wacky with I/O errors on what seems to be the second disk operation I do from the menu, with a caveat: o If I go from a blank disk, I can get to copydist before it gives me an I/O error on every block copy. o If I go from a disk that had a failed install, I can delete the labels (9fat, nvram, fossil, swap), but if I then try to delete the partition, I get an I/O error. Sometimes I can get to fmtfossil from here, but that will always give me an I/O error if I start from this state. o If I go from a disk that had a failed install, and delete the partitions, I try to delete labels later, I get an I/O error when trying to write the labels. It still works fine on the old 100GB disk. I've experimented with various sizes, and installing it after other operating systems, to no avail. Why should the disk matter? --dho
Re: [9fans] Really weird SATA disk/controller issue
On Mon Apr 20 19:55:31 EDT 2009, devon.od...@gmail.com wrote: Hey all, That laptop that I was boasting ran Plan 9 flawlessly (minus the non-native graphics) is now exhibiting some really weird behavior. I've replaced the old Hitachi Travelstar disk (100GB / 7200RPM) with a Seagate 320GB disk (5400RPM). I can install FreeBSD and CentOS fine. When I try to install Plan 9 onto this new disk, I get really weird I/O errors now. If I try to delete labels / partitions, it goes wacky with I/O errors on what seems to be the second disk operation I do from the menu, with a caveat: could you send me the pci listing and any output of i/o errors you have offline? - erik
Re: [9fans] Adventures of a home user
I've done as much as I can and want to do from the documentation for now. Now I'm working on some of the responses to my posts here. Pietro, I did 9fs sources and installed fgb. I'm planning to look at that troff tutorial, the manpage for juke, and the files in /sys/doc. Here's what happened when I installed abaco and tried to use it: term% contrib/install fgb/abaco a 386/bin/abaco 775 sys sys 1195651173 a lib/font/bit lucidasans/passwd.6.font 664 sys sys 1138688455 a sys/src/cmd/abaco 2000775 sys sys 1175566971 ... a sys/src/cmd/abaco/abaco.fonts 664 sys sys 1201369022 term% man abaco *man: no manual page* term% abaco *abaco: can't initialize webfs: '/mnt/web/ctl' does not exist*
Re: [9fans] Adventures of a home user
On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Jim Habegger jimhabeg...@gmail.comwrote: I'm also planning to look into Inferno and the /9/grid. Now, in Plan 9/QEMU/Ubuntu, I need to learn how to access my shared fat partition, and how to copy and paste between the QEMU window and my other Ubuntu windows. - and how to change to a different user without rebooting.
Re: [9fans] Adventures of a home user
... the manpage for juke, ... Juke is really old and kind of painful to use. Easier to just use mp3dec on the command line, but if you must use juke I have some scripts in my contrib (/n/sources/contrib/john/) that will make juke easier to deal with. Here's what happened when I installed abaco and tried to use it: term% contrib/install fgb/abaco a 386/bin/abaco 775 sys sys 1195651173 a lib/font/bit lucidasans/passwd.6.font 664 sys sys 1138688455 a sys/src/cmd/abaco 2000775 sys sys 1175566971 ... a sys/src/cmd/abaco/abaco.fonts 664 sys sys 1201369022 term% man abaco *man: no manual page* term% abaco *abaco: can't initialize webfs: '/mnt/web/ctl' does not exist* You need to run webfs first, and possibly webcookies? If webfs doesn't work, run webcookies; this should be the only time you need to do it. John
