
Show HN: My 5-year basement Plan 9 project - mycroftiv
http://9gridchan.org
======
mycroftiv
While this is here and visible to the public, I would like to see if I can get
someone connected to the EFF to tell John Perry Barlow that an old outsider
hardcore Deadhead may have done something interesting in the world of
computers. Also, I trolled IBM about a patent (see
<http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/173>) and there might be some matters of
professional interest in terms of patent law. A very personal document that
makes the connection between the psychedelic anarchism of the 60s and the
software design of ANTS is found at <http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/206>

Professional colleagues of the late University of Wisconsin Law Professor John
Kidwell might also have a vague personal interest in knowing what his son has
been up to in the world.

I don't like facebook or any of those things, so I'm not well "networked" in
the world. Kind of isolated actually. Me and a basement of Plan 9 machines.
Figured I should reach out a bit.

~~~
liotier
Even if you aren't into "Facebook or any of those things', you could have
found John Perry Barlow's mail address on his home page :
<https://homes.eff.org/~barlow/> \- barlow@eff.org and the AT&T cell phone he
lists there is probably still valid since it is also the one he lists on his
Facebook page...

~~~
mycroftiv
I always figured that it wasn't my place to bug anybody about anything. My
comment was more or less meant as, "I think this might interest him, if you
happen to have a personal connection, you might point it out to him" - it
seems like that is a different kind of thing. See I can't really put what I've
done and what is going on into any kind of meaningful context in my head, so I
feel like I'd just be some crazy person knocking on the door if I tried to
email and explain myself.

I just have a general sense of the world working through personal connections.
I have never considered trying to contact a "public figure" as something which
made sense to do as a random individual. Maybe I'm mistaken in that feeling
though. I honestly haven't figured out how to interface with the world very
successfully and maybe my instinct that I'm not allowed to try to contact
human beings I don't know personally is wrong.

~~~
mscarborough
You went far enough to post this to everyone here, and follow up on it with
comment(s). Most everything here is contacting human beings we/you don't know.
It's OK. Don't feel so bad about it!

If he lists it on his homepage, an email concerning a project of interest is
certainly not overly intrusive. Worst case it gets ignored, better case you go
back and forth about your implementation.

~~~
sp332
Hey mycroftiv, <https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/313356240237506561>

------
mycroftiv
I'm trying to make Plan 9 easier and more fun for home hobby users to explore.
Plan 9 is amazing and I think the possibilities created by the clean and
consistent design are exciting. Advanced Namespace Tools try to make Plan 9
easy to jump into, and also have a more reliable architecture when used as a
grid.

One way to describe my software is as a Grateful Dead inspired approach to
home clustering. Maybe it's even "outsider software art" or some ridiculous
term like that.

Anyway, it has no web/facebook/ecommerce anything aspect to it, so it may not
match the prevailing concerns here, but I tried to make it easy to use by
providing preinstalled virtual machines to play with. Use them on a private
network because they have default passwords and listen for cpu service. The
"ANTS farm" subsite (<http://antfarm.9gridchan.org/tutorial>) has the
VM/tutorial style documentation and walkthroughs.

I'd be interested in any feedback.

~~~
1337p337
It's interesting, but I can't tell from the documentation what it's actually
for. It's apparently for clustering, but what does it do? I had downloaded the
image a week or two back, but it just...booted Plan 9. A few examples that tie
it together or explain some sort of use case would be great.

~~~
mycroftiv
Have you seen the tutorials at the ANTS farm subsite? They show a series of
things you can do to explore the 9worker and 9queen in combination with live
CDs, which show what I believe are new exciting features for Plan 9 that I
have tried to add. There is also a full length paper explaining how I have
tried to improve the design of Plan 9 and how I use ANTS on my systems.

~~~
mcartyem
Can you say in one sentence what it is that you built that doesn't already
exist, and why it is important?

~~~
evolve2k
There is some interesting historical context here following the history and
lessons learnt link in the article.
<http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html>

Found a little more background via Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs>

"Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing
environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous
hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the
start to be a networked operating system.[12] It can be installed as a self-
contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to
separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9
installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers
which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is
provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival
storage.[13] Currently available desktop computers can emulate this
architecture internally using multiple virtual machines."

Anyone else care to explain the elements which make Plan 9 stuff awesome (in
noob terms)?

~~~
emin_gun_sirer
Plan 9 is "Unix done right." Think of everything everyone loves about Unix,
especially its ability to connect components together via pipes and plain text
files, and take it to the limit, and you'll get Plan 9.

Because everything was a file in Plan 9, tasks that were difficult for Unix
were no brainers. Want to redirect your screen from one host to another? No
problem, just mount a different framebuffer over the network. Compare that to
the X11 monstrosity and its associated specific protocols for remote desktops
and screen splitting/sharing and so forth -- in Plan 9, this was just done
with mount.

Want to place a mixer on the audio path? No problem, the filter exports a
filesystem interface, and you just mount it on top of the actual audio file.
Different apps write to what they think is /dev/audio, which turns out to be a
pipe to the mixer, which then mixes the signals from different apps and writes
to the real /dev/audio. Contrast this with the "Poettering-approach" to Pulse
Audio: klunky, specialized, complex, and ultimately broken.

Plan 9 was small, simple and incredibly powerful. Its /proc filesystem had
impact on other OSes, notably Linux, but sadly no existing OS comes anywhere
near its clean and elegant aesthetic.

There were so many other innovative aspects of Plan 9 (e.g. no superuser,
utf-8 for everything, network protocols, the fileserver, the WORM filesystem
that retained everything, the editor, the windowing systems, etc) that I
cannot hope to be comprehensive, so I picked out its main feature. For the
rest, I encourage everyone to read the papers: <http://plan9.bell-
labs.com/sys/doc/>

~~~
enneff
I have heard Rob Pike describe Plan 9, or at least the kernel, as "The most
object-oriented system ever built," (apologies if I paraphrased incorrectly).
He was referring to the fact that everything satisfies one simple interface,
and so everything can be plugged into almost anything else.

~~~
Serow225
How does it compare to the way BeOS was built?

~~~
1337p337
BeOS and Plan 9 have such different concepts of OO that they're hard to
compare. In BeOS, there's a C++ interface your applications have to conform
to, and it's somewhat machine-centric. Your objects are live processes in
memory.

Plan 9 guys tend not to like the design of HTTP ( <http://http02.cat-v.org/> )
so don't tell anyone I used this illustration, but Plan 9 is OO similar to the
way REST is.

In Plan 9 (and Inferno) your objects can be files on disk, structs in memory,
devices, etc. Anything that can conform to the interface. The interface in
this case is files. Your objects expose a filesystem, and you interact with
them by means of the usual tools for file manipulation. The Acme editor
exposes a filesystem, the clipboard ("snarf buffer") is a file, and the
network is, instead of a group of special syscalls, a filesystem. So you could
write a shell script that reads a URL from the snarf buffer, downloads the
page it points to, and puts the content into a new window in Acme, in three or
four lines, without using anything more complex than cat and echo.

------
gregpilling
I like your username. To those that have not read Heinlein's 1959 novel "Moon
is a Harsh Mistress"(1), one of main characters is a computer ("High-Optional,
Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Model L" - a HOLMES FOUR) that
the narrating character has named Mycroft Holmes, or Mike for short. Mike is a
supercomputer that has other computers added to it, until one day he woke up.
It is my favorite novel.

Plan 9 software appears to be software that would enable a person to make a
HOLMES FOUR on their own. Pretty cool.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-
Mistress/dp/03128635...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-
Mistress/dp/0312863551/ref=sr_1_1)

~~~
mycroftiv
Yes you exactly have it. And the structure of the ANTS software is intended to
bring the "non-disruptible mesh" concept of the revolutionary organization of
the novel into the organization of plan 9 grids, which usually have a much
less fail-proof chain of linear single-point of failure dependencies.

Manuel said it was poorly engineered and used #3 arm to improve the boot
namespace.

~~~
gregpilling
My wife works on statistical problems with large data sets. You can imagine
her dislike of me the day I accidentally tripped a breaker and shut off her PC
which had been running a large model for a couple of days. Would it be
possible to use this software and cluster a bunch of old PCs I have from work
into my own little Google-esque cloud? Perhaps that could keep me out of the
doghouse next time if her models could converge quicker with more computing
power.

~~~
mycroftiv
It depends a lot on definitions. Protecting and backing up your data against
hardware failure is a big part of what I want this software to do, but it is
not a drop in replacement for mathematical/scientific cluster computing
solutions at all. It is more about backing up static data, providing multiple
working environments at once, and allowing data to flow between machines in
arbitrarily complex ways.

I think this software is very interesting and does have real world uses, but
it would need work to turn it into a math/science tool, and in general Plan 9
has a much smaller ecosystem built around these things. There are Plan 9
supercomputing projects like XCPU and if that is compatible with your wife's
work it might be relevant to use XCPU top layer on top of ANTS architecture, -
but I've never used XCPU personally.

I would say my software at the moment is better suited to hobby and
exploration at the moment, but if you were interested in the possibilities, it
could have an application in this field.

------
serf
a /g/ mention on a hn linked blog.

end times.

~~~
mappu
From the article:

    
    
        I hope most people know this already, but it needs to be said anyway. 4chan is a
         popular website with millions of users. Negative stereotypes about people who
         visit particular websites are just as silly as thinking that every person who
         lives in Chicago is a gangster or any other unfair assumption.
    

P.S. install gentoo

