csant/log

I have been running Plan 9 on one of my machines since February - first on-and-off from the CD, later giving it a more permanent dwelling on one of the disks.

Obviously I want to access the machine from other machines on the network - and since Linux supports the 9p filesystem in the main-line kernel since 2.6.14, it was extremely easy to set up.

Glenda

The first step is to set up the Plan 9 machine to allow a connection to its filesystem - the easiest way of doing so is to tell the fossil filesystem itself to listen to incoming connections:

term% con /srv/fscons
prompt: listen -N tcp!*!564
prompt: listen -N il!*!17008
prompt:

The right-most argument to listen is in the form net!host!service: basically we told fossil to listen on port 564 to any host, speaking the tcp protocol, and on port 17008 speaking the il protocol. The -N option tells the filesystem that an un-authenticated user may connect at any time (else he would be only allowed to connect from a certain machine after an authenticated user has connected) - keep in mind that you should use this only in secure environments - obviously you can be more restrictive with the IP address allowed to connect, and remove the -N flag to require authentication. That's about everything we need to do on the Plan 9 machine.

Tux

Next we switch back to the Linux system. Make sure you are running with support for 9p - enable CONFIG_9P_FS=m in the kernel .config file. (Note: the former 9p2000 module goes now under the name of 9p). You will also need the plan9port tools installed.

Start the factotum and the network file service:

$ factotum
$ srv plan_9_machine_ip

and then mount the Plan 9 machine:

$ sudo mount -t 9p -o proto=tcp plan_9_machine_ip /mnt/9/

That's all. Enjoy!

Note for the curious:

…or the uninformed: Tux and Glenda are, respectively, the Linux and Plan 9 mascottes.