Re: Distributed VSTa

 
>Over this weekend I had a laptop without a vstafs partition (so I
couldn't
>hunt that race condition) so I instead hacked on networking and proxyd.
>The result was this evening I was able to mount a filesystem:
>
> mount fs/root:tmp@205.187.71.66 /dist

Sounds great! I really haven't gotten into much networking with VSTa,
but that's really cool.

>I'm not sure this is the best syntax. Normally it would be:
>
> mount fs/root:tmp /dist
>
>which would ask the namer for the server registered as serving fs/root
>(i.e., the root filesystem), and then access the "tmp" subdirectory of
>that filesystem. Thus, /tmp from the root filesystem would be seen as
>/dist.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to break out another abstraction layer
and use something like:

         mount fs/root:tmp@//net/tcpip/205.187.71.66 /dist

Then those of us without ethernet can still play with it by doing

         mount fs/root:tmp@//tty/rs232 /dist

In fact, it would be possible to run it off of a local pipe in this
manner, for testing and debugging.

>By adding the "@<ipaddr>" suffix, this same request occurs, but out on
the
>named remote system. You end up with an open port as before, but now
your
>port actually goes to the TCP/IP stack, across a TCP connection to the
>remote, and into an instance of "proxyd" (from
src/srv/ka9q/cmd/proxyd.c)
>which does the I/O on your behalf.

I'm still confused about how the ka9q suite works. I didn't have an
ethernet
card to play with, but when I launched it I got a command-line
interface.
Is there a separate set of TCP/IP servers, or how does it work?

>So anything in VSTa which runs using kernel IPC (i.e., most things) can
>now be accessed remotely. Hmmm, I think I'll union mount a remote
/proc,
>and then I can get process lists and kill processes from my local shell
>with the normal shell commands. ;->

Hey, you could mount a virtual console on the other machine, and then
run a local login on that console! I'll bet that would really confuse
the
other user.

Or how about mounting their pipes and putting funny messages as
they page through with less. Heheh, this could be fun.
Received on Mon Nov 30 06:17:13 1998