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Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

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Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#61

Post by zozbot234 »

moody__ wrote: post #46
packetlost wrote: post #10

I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.

Could you expand more on what you would like out of an "enterprise Plan 9"?

It could be used to replace k8s-based deployments (also Docker Swarms, etc.) since system interfaces on Plan 9 are namespaced and containerized "out-of-the-box" as part of its basic design (and this is one of the most prominent additions compared to *NIX). It's not a hacked-on feature as with Linux.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#62

Post by MisterTea »

pbohun wrote: post #59
MisterTea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window. I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if n…

Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.

Totally get it. Vmx on 9front with a Linux or BSD VM is the way to go if you want to try to go 100% 9. If you like you can experiment with this on a used laptop with supported hardware, thinkpad best. It's not lightning fast at the moment (patches welcome) but it works well enough.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#63

Post by jen20 »

bradfitz wrote: post #41
chrsw wrote: post #37

My employer-controlled browser won't let me access that URL. At first it was cert errors and now it's just blocked.

Weird. It's just Vercel on AWS. We have no alerts firing about any probers having cert errors or anything. I wonder what your employer/policy doesn't like.

I've found that tailscale.com sometimes gets blocked by overzealous content filters as "VPN software".

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#65

Post by packetlost »

moody__ wrote: post #46
packetlost wrote: post #10

I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.

Could you expand more on what you would like out of an "enterprise Plan 9"?

the distributed computing model is pretty nice in theory (maybe not in practice) and the uniform system APIs are also nice. The userspace tools in particular are just plain better (structured regex commands are quite a bit better than ed-style and I find myself using them far more frequently in vis than I do in vim, they're far more composable and intuitive).

The biggest thing is the heavy reliance on union file systems (and file systems in general) and an extremely simple syscall API. It's a heterogeneous-networked-node OS so it handles realistic workloads natively with primitives designed for it instead of piling complexity on top of Unix-like APIs (ie. Linux). I dunno, I just think a lot of the modern "cloud native" stack is unnecessary if you had an OS actually built for the workloads we have.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#66

Post by raggi »

In case y'all missed it in the first post, and you just want to try this out, it's working in this v86 image:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=custom&m=768&vram=16&hda.url=ht...

You can start tailscaled and tailscale inside the VM. It may take a while to come online sometimes due to limited proxy availability.

Edit: alt gives you the third button. To start a terminal, hold alt and right click, select new, release alt, and right click drag to size the terminal window.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#67

Post by numbsafari »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #38
pbohun wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.

Doesn’t plan9 support frame buffers over 9p or something like that? You could probably write a wrapper that just forwards a Linux browser to a plan9 window

Many years ago a roommate and I had an HPUX machine running IE on HPUX just so we could forward X session to our FreeBSD and Linux desktops and not have to use our Windows machine for anything other than PC games.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#69

Post by moody__ »

packetlost wrote: post #65
moody__ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand more on what you would like out of an "enterprise Plan 9"?

the distributed computing model is pretty nice in theory (maybe not in practice) and the uniform system APIs are also nice. The userspace tools in particular are just plain better (structured regex commands are quite a bit better than ed-style and I find myself using them far more frequently in vis than I do in vim, they're far more composable and intuitive). The biggest thing is the heavy reliance on union file syst…

There aren't really union filesystems per se, the plan 9 kernel provides unions through its namespace model. In my opinion part of the reason why the userspace tools can be as nice as they are, are due to the use of file system interfaces and the simplistic syscall API. Could you elaborate more on the issues you see with the use of these?

In regards to using it for a "cloud native" stack, the issue is that people want to run code that isn't designed for Plan 9. You could build whatever backplane type thing you want out of plan 9 but the end goal is still likely to be to run some web app or REST api server. Unless someone does a great deal of effort to port all of those environments that people want (nodejs, modern python, etc) you're going to be stuck using a VM and losing a lot of the benefit.

This feels similar to what Joyent did with lxzones in SmartOS, where the backplane was solaris based but the apps they were running for clients were using Linux. It's hard to make the plan 9 backplane better enough to warrant dealing with integrating the guest and host environment.

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