I do expect tailscale drive shares to use 9P in that case ;-P
Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
51–60 of 100 posts
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#52Earlier 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
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Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#53This is so cool to see. Plan9 was a wonderful part of my COVID isolation, and I miss playing with it. This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.
> This might have inspired me to spin up a 9front VM this weekend.
Please do! Just be careful with your sysupdate.
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#54Happy to answer any questions! A bunch of us are currently in https://meet.google.com/qre-gydb-mkv chatting about this. (Edit: the hour is over; we all left) The earlier Apr 1st blog post was https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-enterprise-plan-9-suppo...
I've never set up a Plan 9 system... does this allow the distributed systems communications to run through my Tailnet?
Yes, you could do something like keep a small root fs or pack everything into the kernels paqfs to boot into a Tailscale VPN and pull root from another 9 machine on the VPN. Then pull resources in from other machines including non 9 systems.
Either way it makes VPN easy between 9 and non 9 machines. Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace. But that makes seamless Unix and Windows comms difficult.
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never set up a Plan 9 system... does this allow the distributed systems communications to run through my Tailnet?
Yes, you could do something like keep a small root fs or pack everything into the kernels paqfs to boot into a Tailscale VPN and pull root from another 9 machine on the VPN. Then pull resources in from other machines including non 9 systems. Either way it makes VPN easy between 9 and non 9 machines. Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace.…
> Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace
Note that one of Tailscale's main party tricks is NAT traversal, when both machines are behind different NATs and can't otherwise get a connection open to each other. (And then Tailscale ultimately falls back to a relay server on the internet if it can't get a direct connection for IP packets)
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#56Russ Cox is an absolute legend for committing to this joke.
Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.
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 not bigger than the kernels they run on. That is an absurd state to be in - your runtime requires a billion dollar company to maintain. Even open source Firefox needs millions in funding.
Whereas a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. That's the runtime I want, something I can understand. The process is the container on plan 9 so you have everything you need to build distributed apps without a web browser. It's human scale distributed computing. I'd like a future without the "modern" corporate scale web.
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#57[deleted]
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you could do something like keep a small root fs or pack everything into the kernels paqfs to boot into a Tailscale VPN and pull root from another 9 machine on the VPN. Then pull resources in from other machines including non 9 systems. Either way it makes VPN easy between 9 and non 9 machines. Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace.…
> Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace Note that one of Tailscale's main party tricks is NAT traversal, when both machines are behind different NATs and can't otherwise get a connection open to each other. (And then Tailscale ultimately falls back to a relay server on the internet if it can't get a direct connection for IP packets)
For situations where you have no control over the NAT then this is indeed the case.
Though, 9front lets you run your own NAT giving you an Internet facing 9 machine you can serve a TLS tunnel from directly. So the server side is solved making the client side NAT a non issue.
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.
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.
Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Otherwise Plan 9 can do it's own VPN-like over tls or ssh tunnels and bind remote network stacks to a local namespace Note that one of Tailscale's main party tricks is NAT traversal, when both machines are behind different NATs and can't otherwise get a connection open to each other. (And then Tailscale ultimately falls back to a relay server on the internet if it can't get a direct connection for IP packets)
For situations where you have no control over the NAT then this is indeed the case. Though, 9front lets you run your own NAT giving you an Internet facing 9 machine you can serve a TLS tunnel from directly. So the server side is solved making the client side NAT a non issue.
If your 9front machine is in a position on the network whereby it could serve a NAT, you don't have many networking problems at that point. Almost all operating systems can do NAT in such a position.
I'm talking about two machines deep in somebody else's network or where you don't control the router/NAT.