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User story #8138

Updated by Janos Mattyasovszky over 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 

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