Rudder Agent for Plan9 Network Operating System¶

Status
Currently, Plan9 nodes are not recognized on Rudder, not even as generic computing system, which is bad.
I think it would be a very great addition due to it's focus on scalability and central management.¶

A picture I found on Google
This is the logo, which looks really cute.
¶

Plan 9 began in the late 1980s as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a systemthat was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputersas its computing elements.
A large Plan 9 installation has a number of computers networked together, eachproviding a particular class of service. Shared multiprocessor servers provide computingcycles; other large machines offer file storage.
The view of the system is built upon three principles. First, resources are named and accessed like files in a hierarchical file system. Second, there is a standard protocol,called 9P, for accessing these resources.
(9P is also commonly used on Linux and might already be supported!) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol) -- https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/9p.txt
Plan9 is a supported platform for the Go language which all really professional SRE web hipsters use.

Needed Features:

• Installing Plan9 "bundles" - adding software!
• FusionInventory Support to properly detect screen resolution and optional hardware like TV cards
• Management of special users and permssions (i.e. "none")
• Unicode support
• Support running in rtf and rudder-vagrant (a premade Vagrant box is already available! See the following URL: https://vagrantcloud.com/deck36/boxes/plan9)
• Network configuration including NTP management via the central server (maybe it's easiest to run Rudder on this one?)
• Process management (kill > /proc/pid/ctl)

• SEO-wise Rudder would benefit a lot it then be added to the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Plan_9_programs
• No other CM system currently has Plan9 on their supported OS list
• The CFEngine fileserver could be replaced by the 9P fileserver that comes with any Plan9 system
• This would offer higher performance and scalability (like an automatic relay placed in each node)
• additional features would become available like HSM allowing to keep rarely accessed client information on a tape library (Green IT)
• Security of the server installation would be improved by the obscurity, that the most script-kiddies have probably not even heard of such a great OS!
• The network database (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/net/net.html, chapter 4.1) could be fully integrated using a Rudder plugin
• insane scalabiltiy - quoting from http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/blue_gene/petascale_plan_9/:

_Plan 9’s abilities can even simplify its own deployment: we wrap a synthetic file system layer around the original command-line based front-end control interface to the Blue Gene. This synthetic file system gives the feel of direct interaction with each node, and plugs nicely into existing Plan 9 tools, such as the Acid debugger, allowing cluster-wide debugging of both applications and system software.
(Take that, Ansible)

An overview of configuration management in Plan9 is given here:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Network_configuration/index.html