
Whither Plan 9? History and motivation - wtbob
http://pub.gajendra.net/2016/05/plan9part1
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mjevans
Not knowing the details but reflecting on what the summary said and what I do
know of Xwindows style systems...

Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network.

We have learned, since that time, that trusting the network isn't really a
good idea. Even a local network might not really be trustworthy.

The division of services that they describe sounds quite wonderful for normal
office tasks; but doesn't work well for networks that can shard or for remote
users that tunnel in (VPN) and might be disconnected.

~~~
zeveb
> Plan 9 sure puts a lot of trust in the network.

I don't know how true that really is. It certainly trusts that the network is
_there_ , and after authentication/authorisation it trusts that network
devices are not malicious — but that's no different from anything else.

I do think that there's some excellent work yet to be done in authenticating
local networks. How do I know that the DHCP server I'm talking to is the right
DHCP server for my network? How do I know that the WiFi access point I'm
talking to actually is who it says it is?

Really, that is a specific instance of the broader problem of naming. I don't
have an answer, but I'd love to read some attempts to get at the answer.

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wtbob
I like to imagine that something like containers could provide a rationalised
POSIX successor like Plan 9 while still cooperating in the main with a less-
clean kernel like Linux. Not certain exactly how that'd work, but it might
provide a nice path to building cleaner systems.

~~~
pjmlp
I like to think that Android, iOS with Swift, Windows with .NET, Unikernels
are somehow evolution paths for what Inferno/Limbo could have been.

Maybe someone tries something like what you are proposing, using Go in place
of Limbo.

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jalfresi
Anyone had any experience running the RaspberryPi Plan9? It seems like the
ideal way to set up a small cluster using some cheap RaspberryPi Zeros as
compute, maybe one for file storage and another as a terminal.

~~~
driusan
The Plan9 raspberry pi is probably the easiest way to get Plan 9 up and
running, but not very powerful. The default image only has a 2gb partition. If
you're interested in venti, it's a difficult process that needs to be manually
set up (vs the ISO installer where it just asks you if you want to install
fossil or fossil+venti) It makes a great introduction to Plan 9, and would
probably make a great terminal for an existing Plan 9 cluster, but I wouldn't
try making a cluster of them.

I use mine as a login server (and something to drawterm into when I want to
play around with Plan 9 without booting up a VM), which is a great use case
for it. I initially wanted to use it for Go development, but:

1\. I had to start by writing a git client, which I never finished enough to
be useable.

2\. plan9/arm is only in Go tip (and will be in 1.7)

~~~
jalfresi
Interesting stuff. I was always intrigued by Plan9 (via Go). The same thought
had crossed my mind too, that Plan9 may be a great dev environment for Go;
apparently the 9p package is excellent.

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f2f
previous "discussion" here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767597)

