9fans archive / 1998 / 04 / 42 /    prev next

From: G. David Butler gdb@dbS...
Subject: [9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 08:50:34 -0500

From: geoff@pla...

>                             I'm told that a `full feed' runs to 1 - 2
>gigabytes per day, depending on who you ask for numbers, and that
>information is undoubtedly out of date; it's surely much more now.

It is more.

>I would have thought my record of activism against NNTP, especially for
>news reading, spoke for itself.  To hit some highlights: the C News crew

It does.

>ignored NNTP for years; publicly encouraged use of NFS or other, better
>remote file systems instead of NNTP for news reading, despite aversion to

Speaking from my own experience, news on a filesystem is ok inside an
organization where you don't need logging (of news access patterns) or
per user authenication.  Also, as the volume has increased, the techniques
of storing the data has moved away from the file system (look at cfs in
INN).  Since the access pattern of reading news is different than the
access pattern of general file access, it makes sense to separate the
access from the implementation.  But NNTP, as a protocol, is lacking.

What about IMAP?  It looks very much like a filesystem protocol that
makes few implementation restrictions.  The problem here is that it
also puts some client side functions in the server (e.g. searching files
for pattern matches.)  Since IMAP is not well adopted yet, perhaps
9P (or Styx) could be put forward as an alternative?

[snip more news/NNTP stuff]

Enough about news.  This is the Plan9 list.  The reason I picked News
is because it is hard, has insane volume and the users look at the
output and tell me it doesn't work.  In other words I'm using News to
test my operating system!  My file servers contain all the performance
(thin OS, efficient protocol, btree indexed directories, RAID-0) and
robustness (RAID-1, checksumed data blocks, full logging including data)
to make it work.  The cpu servers simply convert NNTP, IMAP, etc. to 9P.

Think about it.  ISPs spend a *lot* of good money on big UNIX iron,
giant NFS file servers, and very large RAID boxes to handle this
application at enormous cost.  So I gather together a bunch of
inexpensive PCs, hard drives and networking and do a *better* job
because I use Plan9!  That is what I call fun!

-------------------------------------------------------------------
G. David Butler   | Who I? Zathras, a Plan9er. Nobody uses Zathras'
                  | system, but Zathras not mind. Zathras used to 
                  | having others ignore Zathras. Besides, Zathras
gdb@dbS... | have best system, so Zathras happy.