Show HN: My 5-year basement Plan 9 project

by mycroftiv • 13 years ago

131 45 13 years ago

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

I'm trying to make Plan 9 easier and more fun for home hobby users to explore. Plan 9 is amazing and I think the possibilities created by the clean and consistent design are exciting. Advanced Namespace Tools try to make Plan 9 easy to jump into, and also have a more reliable architecture when used as a grid.

One way to describe my software is as a Grateful Dead inspired approach to home clustering. Maybe it's even "outsider software art" or some ridiculous term like that.

Anyway, it has no web/facebook/ecommerce anything aspect to it, so it may not match the prevailing concerns here, but I tried to make it easy to use by providing preinstalled virtual machines to play with. Use them on a private network because they have default passwords and listen for cpu service. The "ANTS farm" subsite (http://antfarm.9gridchan.org/tutorial) has the VM/tutorial style documentation and walkthroughs.

I'd be interested in any feedback.

kirbysayshi• 13 years ago

I've heard of Plan 9, but I honestly have no idea what this is. But it sounds interesting... could you give a briefer to someone that is not familiar with Plan 9?

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

It's free form clustering software. Standard Plan 9 tends to have a pretty rigid structure for how all the services on the grid are organized. This is an attempt to make things much more free-form, so the system can be set up more easily by home users, and everything is more reliable.

1337p3374• 13 years ago

It's interesting, but I can't tell from the documentation what it's actually for. It's apparently for clustering, but what does it do? I had downloaded the image a week or two back, but it just...booted Plan 9. A few examples that tie it together or explain some sort of use case would be great.

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

Have you seen the tutorials at the ANTS farm subsite? They show a series of things you can do to explore the 9worker and 9queen in combination with live CDs, which show what I believe are new exciting features for Plan 9 that I have tried to add. There is also a full length paper explaining how I have tried to improve the design of Plan 9 and how I use ANTS on my systems.

serf• 13 years ago

a /g/ mention on a hn linked blog.

end times.

cturner• 13 years ago

What do you mean?

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

From the op's blog- http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html

mappu• 13 years ago

From the article:

    I hope most people know this already, but it needs to be said anyway. 4chan is a
     popular website with millions of users. Negative stereotypes about people who
     visit particular websites are just as silly as thinking that every person who
     lives in Chicago is a gangster or any other unfair assumption.

P.S. install gentoo

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

While this is here and visible to the public, I would like to see if I can get someone connected to the EFF to tell John Perry Barlow that an old outsider hardcore Deadhead may have done something interesting in the world of computers. Also, I trolled IBM about a patent (see http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/173) and there might be some matters of professional interest in terms of patent law. A very personal document that makes the connection between the psychedelic anarchism of the 60s and the software design of ANTS is found at http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/206

Professional colleagues of the late University of Wisconsin Law Professor John Kidwell might also have a vague personal interest in knowing what his son has been up to in the world.

I don't like facebook or any of those things, so I'm not well "networked" in the world. Kind of isolated actually. Me and a basement of Plan 9 machines. Figured I should reach out a bit.

delano• 13 years ago

Outsider art is an important part of the ecosystem. Nice work.

switz2• 13 years ago

From one head to another, nice job.

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

I have heard that we are everywhere. I'm having kind of a personal crisis after having brought this project to this stage, and I feel like my personal VW has overheated and is broken down by the side of the road on the way to the show, and I could use a little bit of that famous Deadhead community helping hand to keep myself from losing it.

Thanks my friend.

cgio• 13 years ago

I am not well versed in Plan9, but it looks to me like this can be significantly more important than we think now. Personal Clustering might very well be the PC of the future, especially with the proliferation of many small personal devices and in the path to a more ubiquitous computing environment. I also think that this could very well be just the opening to a more decentralised/democratised internet. Finding out how the intersection of the crypto/cyberpunk movement and personal clustering and open access could emerge is a very interesting concept and I would be glad to contribute or even be a simple observer in this. If someone has similar thoughts/ideas, do not hesitate to shoot me an email. I will reach out to the OP too.

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

I've had a lot of ideas like that also, but be warned - the Plan 9 landscape is absolutely littered with speculative, half-baked amateur ideas that go absolutely nowhere. I know this because I was part of one when I first got involved in Plan 9. As a result of that, I have tried to make the Advanced Namespace Tools something that usefully expands the capabilities of Plan 9, but the gap between the current reality of "nobody uses plan 9" and the blue-sky possibilities is huge. For right now, it's probably best to think smaller and keep that bigger picture in the back of the mind. That's my conclusion from practical experience. I do like the ideas, but reality is a hard place for ideas.

det23x• 13 years ago

Very cool work. I am glad there are people still working on Plan9 and its concepts. I think it is a very underappreciated OS but its time will come atleast its ideas. Kudos!

liotier• 13 years ago

Even if you aren't into "Facebook or any of those things', you could have found John Perry Barlow's mail address on his home page : https://homes.eff.org/~barlow/ - barlow@eff.org and the AT&T cell phone he lists there is probably still valid since it is also the one he lists on his Facebook page...

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

I always figured that it wasn't my place to bug anybody about anything. My comment was more or less meant as, "I think this might interest him, if you happen to have a personal connection, you might point it out to him" - it seems like that is a different kind of thing. See I can't really put what I've done and what is going on into any kind of meaningful context in my head, so I feel like I'd just be some crazy person knocking on the door if I tried to email and explain myself.

I just have a general sense of the world working through personal connections. I have never considered trying to contact a "public figure" as something which made sense to do as a random individual. Maybe I'm mistaken in that feeling though. I honestly haven't figured out how to interface with the world very successfully and maybe my instinct that I'm not allowed to try to contact human beings I don't know personally is wrong.

gregpilling2• 13 years ago

I like your username. To those that have not read Heinlein's 1959 novel "Moon is a Harsh Mistress"(1), one of main characters is a computer ("High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Model L" - a HOLMES FOUR) that the narrating character has named Mycroft Holmes, or Mike for short. Mike is a supercomputer that has other computers added to it, until one day he woke up. It is my favorite novel.

Plan 9 software appears to be software that would enable a person to make a HOLMES FOUR on their own. Pretty cool.

1. http://www.amazon.com/The-Moon-Is-Harsh-Mistress/dp/03128635...

mycroftiv11• 13 years ago

Yes you exactly have it. And the structure of the ANTS software is intended to bring the "non-disruptible mesh" concept of the revolutionary organization of the novel into the organization of plan 9 grids, which usually have a much less fail-proof chain of linear single-point of failure dependencies.

Manuel said it was poorly engineered and used #3 arm to improve the boot namespace.

gregpilling2• 13 years ago

My wife works on statistical problems with large data sets. You can imagine her dislike of me the day I accidentally tripped a breaker and shut off her PC which had been running a large model for a couple of days. Would it be possible to use this software and cluster a bunch of old PCs I have from work into my own little Google-esque cloud? Perhaps that could keep me out of the doghouse next time if her models could converge quicker with more computing power.

Show HN: My 5-year basement Plan 9 project

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