User story #8138
Updated by Janos Mattyasovszky about 8 years ago
h1. Rudder Agent for Plan9 Network Operating System h1. h2. 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. h2. A picture I found on Google This is the logo, which looks really cute. !http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/img/spaceglenda37.jpg! 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. h2. 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) h2.Bonus h2. Bonus from this port: * 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