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Technology & Information / Building a real distributed Plan 9 system
« on: December 06, 2017, 10:56:45 PM »
So this is more of a medium-to-long-term thing, but I want to try to build a proper distributed Plan 9 system, with all the services running on different machines, and I've been thinking about what hardware to use.
So far, I'm leaning towards:
File server - HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10
Auth server - Raspberry Pi
To be honest, I actually don't know much about the auth server or what resources it needs, but I can't imagine it being too intensive, so a RPi should suffice.
Cpu server - Intel NUC7i7BNH
Terminal - any web browser
This is actually the fun bit. I plan to install 9webdraw, which is an HTML5 implementation of a Plan 9 terminal. As a result, I will be able to use any web browser on any Internet-connected computer anywhere as a terminal for this whole system.
Of course, I'll probably also install a real Plan 9 terminal, most likely on my X201, but having the ability to make any public computer into a terminal for my own OS seems like a neat feature. This will also make it easy to hand out accounts to anyone else who may be interested in the system.
Software is a no-brainer, of course. 9front is the only competently maintained Plan 9 derivative. As a bonus, it has an x86 hypervisor, so I can run OpenBSD in a VM on the cpu server for all my Unix crapware.
So far, I'm leaning towards:
File server - HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10
- https://www.hpe.com/nl/en/product-catalog/servers/proliant-servers/pip.specifications.hpe-proliant-microserver-gen10.1009955178.html
- Supports hardware RAID 5 with an internal SSD, which is the ideal use case for Plan 9's cwfs.
- I'll probably stuff it full of cheap Seagate Archive disks for 24 TB total capacity, with at least a 120 GB SSD cache.
- I can get a second one running Linux for backups.
Auth server - Raspberry Pi
To be honest, I actually don't know much about the auth server or what resources it needs, but I can't imagine it being too intensive, so a RPi should suffice.
Cpu server - Intel NUC7i7BNH
- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/kits/nuc7i7bnh.html
- Straightforward to run diskless.
- 32 GiB of RAM means plenty of compute capacity.
Terminal - any web browser
This is actually the fun bit. I plan to install 9webdraw, which is an HTML5 implementation of a Plan 9 terminal. As a result, I will be able to use any web browser on any Internet-connected computer anywhere as a terminal for this whole system.
Of course, I'll probably also install a real Plan 9 terminal, most likely on my X201, but having the ability to make any public computer into a terminal for my own OS seems like a neat feature. This will also make it easy to hand out accounts to anyone else who may be interested in the system.
Software is a no-brainer, of course. 9front is the only competently maintained Plan 9 derivative. As a bonus, it has an x86 hypervisor, so I can run OpenBSD in a VM on the cpu server for all my Unix crapware.