[KLUG Members] New advances in filesystems.

[Peter Buxton]

First of all, did everyone see the Monday USA Today Money-section cover
story on Linux beating M$ in Munich? It takes up all of page 2. :-D

I read the PDF, too. It strikes me as a very lightweight and rather
underthought paper on some of the more fascinating ideas out there on
filesystems and traditional UNIX problems.

I remember reading the following joke a year or two ago:

Under Unix, everything is a file.
Under Linux, everything is a filesystem.

and wondering what the joke was. It seemed brilliant to me. Apparently,
it seemed that way to the makers of Plan 9, as well, because that's just
what they did. Al Viro, the demigod of Linux VFS, is a participant on
Plan 9 mailing lists.

> Every possible TCP/UDP port as a file?  I thought /dev was ugly enough
> already.

Only when you let some moron precreate every file. Linux's devfs, though
under fire from a number of camps for a number of reasons (right down to
the author's coding style), makes /dev look positively pretty. Forget
lspci, unless you're looking for some really obscure piece of hardware.
`ls /dev/$something` is enough. Look at the following:

http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20030428_214.html#10
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20030309_208.html#4
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20030113_200.html#2
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20021014_188.html#7
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20020923_185.html#6

for some more information about the attempts to hammer devfs or udev
into shape.

LDAP is just another transport protocol, not unlike HTTP. Exporting data
over it does not extend Linux in the slightest. These new ideas (9P,
devfs, udev) are all about building new capabilities into Linux itself
-- and then, if you like, you can export their data/permissions over
LDAP/Kerberos (or in XML -- which is another transport people are trying
to press into foreign service).

Frankly, Adam, your presentation on Kerberos V was fascinating and
frightening. Running a Windows network at CARES, I was interested to
learn more of the model underneath it, which you explained really well.
But your description of the layers and config files required to
implement KV convinced me I would never install it at home. You said you
wanted to get rid of all the tiny files that govern sign on!

Well, this is how they're going to do it.


I can't guarantee that all of these links are interesting, they're a
subfolder in my Linux bookmarks and they're usually there to lead me
somewhere interesting:

http://www.vitanuova.com/
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/names.html
http://www.lucent.com/press/0802/020807.bla.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/auth.html
http://www.byte.com/art/9710/sec4/art5.htm
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
http://www.fywss.com/plan9/
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/26590579%2C491335%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/23504/http:zSzzSzwww.acl.lanl.govzSz%7ErminnichzSzv9fszSzdobbs.pdf/a-private-name-space.pdf
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
http://www.fywss.com/plan9/plan9faq.html#find
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/installation_instructions/index.html
http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/usr/nemo/9.html
http://www.caldo.demon.co.uk/plan9/soft/index.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/lexnames.html


-- 
Though nothing is wasted, everything is spent. -- A. Dillard