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Security in Plan 9 (2002)

9p.io

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Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#62
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosted on a plan9 system

And? One can run a not-so-scalable web server on any OS last time I checked.

Would love to "Lego" block build hardware and software components on the following stack:

1. RK3588 Rockchip 12in Thinkpad cross HTC style slideout keyboard form factor 2. Plan 9 Legacy OS 3. seL4 microkernel, Qi cross Racket IDE

and to compete what people can do scaling out to the "cloud" at price thresholds, maybe a gifted individual or team will realise the 2100 movie's HAL9000 sentience.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#63
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly coz some people that worked on it went to big companies. Go being one example.

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the timeline. The people who built it had already built UNIX and C (and one of them would later write Limbo). Go's initial splash in the "press" was helped massively by that pedigree.

I meant that if same people went to work to some small unknown company nobody would care as none of their software would have a pull of something pushed by Google

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it was first announced, it wasn't clear it would end up being so esoteric, but I remember that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Rob Pike were working on it, and maybe Brian Kernighan too? Timing-wise, it was too late for what they ended up doing, but anything all those people worked on is bound to have some interesting ideas. It's been weird watching the rise of iOS loosen the reliance on, or even awareness of,…

Was timing the issue though? Wasn't it released during that period of confusion of the Unix wars before GNU/Linux took over the world? I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

I tried to install it once, a long time ago (around 2000?). Linux was already taking off, BSD's had the possibility to overtake it, other unices were made available more for the end user.

But basically, the hardware support was pretty bad. It took me a long time to find a SCSI controller which was supported, when ATA disks were already standard for years. Same with network- oder graphic cards.

Nowadays, if esoteric OS's would just support standard Vmware hardware, they'd be much more successful (looking at you fuchsia!)

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the timeline. The people who built it had already built UNIX and C (and one of them would later write Limbo). Go's initial splash in the "press" was helped massively by that pedigree.

I meant that if same people went to work to some small unknown company nobody would care as none of their software would have a pull of something pushed by Google

I know that's what you meant and you absolutely have it backwards. These are the people who built some of the most iconic technology BEFORE building Plan 9. Are you seriously not familiar with their work on UNIX and C at Bell Labs? Because all of them were legends long before going to Google. Them going to Google was a big deal because of who they already were, not Google. If you're not old enough to remember their ideas being a big deal before they joined Google you need to go do some reading because you're lacking pretty real historical context.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and /proc Unfortunately, kids these days seem to be afraid of files. For a hardcore unix fan, curl and wget are useless tools when you can just cat /www/url

/proc is cute for manual tasks but utterly broke as an API due to inherent races and issues passing context around.

So utterly broke that the poor "htop" program cannot work at all... oh wait

     $ strace htop 2>/tmp/e   # wait for htop to load and then press 'q'
     $ cat /tmp/e | grep ^open | grep /proc | wc -l
     49817
htop is essentially "find /proc" with a pretty output. Is htop broken for you?

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, it's where UTF-8 debuted

and /proc Unfortunately, kids these days seem to be afraid of files. For a hardcore unix fan, curl and wget are useless tools when you can just cat /www/url

And yet Plan 9 has a curl/wget equivalent, `hget`.

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You echo the request into /www/url and cat the response from it

How does it know where to send it? Does it just assume it should use the contents of the Host header and send the request there or is the "url" in your path the destination? Does it support things like SNI?[1] Can you spoof that? Does it expect clients to parse out the raw output of the HTTP response? I have so many questions. From a quick glance this seems a lot harder to work with than curl for both trivial and non…

[deleted]

Re: Security in Plan 9 (2002)

#69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and /proc Unfortunately, kids these days seem to be afraid of files. For a hardcore unix fan, curl and wget are useless tools when you can just cat /www/url

And yet Plan 9 has a curl/wget equivalent, `hget`.

In the ideal world this would be a two-line wrapper that just calls cat on the given url
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