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Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the im

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike. And Rob Pike once said[2]: > When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html [2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

pjc50 10y ago
everything was connected and uniform I've never been entirely clear whether this referred to 'everything within the Plan9 organisation' or 'everything visible from a Plan9 machine including external independent systems'. The former is much easier to achieve. So much of the nonuniformity is because of competing administrative domains.
- knorker 10y ago
  "Everything that was on my machine was uniform because I wrote it from scratch to work the way my brain works" Yeah… that doesn't scale, no matter who you are, mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".
  - koluft 10y ago
    You seem so angry for such a bizarre reason.
    - Joeri 10y ago
      Maybe he used to have 'r' as login.
    - knorker 10y ago
      Irrationality and denying reality annoys me.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name". And what's that to you?
    - knorker 10y ago
      Another sign that he lives in his own arrogant world. A separate arrogant world that affects other people.
chronial 10y ago
What is new about this, is that it is none of the three things that your quote listed as possibilities. The new thing is a remote storage that has a smartly synchronized local "cache".
- rakoo 10y ago
  Nothing could prevent a remote filesystem to have a local cache, actually this is what every remote filesystem would implement quite soon. The real novelty of Infinit is that you can mix and match multiple storages and build a unified filesystem with encryption on top of this. Roughly something like truecrypt over aufs over (sftp+local fs+s3fs+whateveryouwantfs)
aidenn0 10y ago
On P9 at Bell labs, everything could be connected and uniform. In the real world with corporate firewalls, HTTPS is very nearly the only reliable option for connecting to other computers. On top of that, the fact that most workstations in this world do not have public IP addresses, and p2p becomes really a non-starter.
- zymhan 10y ago
  First of all, you can just tunnel whatever storage protocol over HTTPS if needed. The point of the quote is that we could be using Operating Systems that abstract away the various kinds of storage available so that you can use whatever combination of options work for you. It's like if everyone was using Linux and paid for plans from for example a cloud storage provider, but was able to reliably and automatically mount their storage like any other network share. With open technology and widespread fast internet, it's really not that hard to accomplish. We've already got the former. Now we just need a lot more of the latter.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  This seemingly destructive segmentation of the Internet is precisely what will lead to its successor: a collection of "overlay networks" built on top of the existing IP stack. We're already seeing it in many ways, with Tor and VPNs as two commonly used examples. But overlay networks are not just advantageous for packet transport. They can represent any decentralized network. BitCoin is an overlay network, in that it's literally a payment network, is a payment network, built on top of existing IP infrastructure. We are going to see more and more of these "overlays" as the Internet "re-decentralizes". Sure, what we know as "the Internet" is becoming increasingly centralized, and people are right to be concerned. But there is nothing to fear, so long as we can build more abstractions on top of the Internet as we know it. Let Amazon, Google, and the big "clouds" centralize as much of the Internet as they want. They are only digging their own grave, because the next revolution, the "Internet 2.0" will be as decentralized as its predecessor. Only instead of being built on the "dumb pipes" of copper and fiber, it will be built on the "dumb pipes" of the existing, increasingly centralized, Internet. The more the Internet infrastructure consolidates itself, the more it provides an opportunity to re-decentralize on top of it.
Aleman360 10y ago
Seems like a leaky abstraction. Did their interfaces have a way to account for differences in latency and failure modes, or was that hidden?
maaku 10y ago
Downvoted because when I click "comments" I want to see comments about the article, not some unrelated system.
codemac 10y ago
Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me. For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a blob under the same file. It makes oauth2 look decent. Saying that you managed to push everything through a file interface is interesting, but it's no more or less connected than a world of http:// http://
- f2f 10y ago
  you're being deliberately obtuse. the uniformity in plan9 didn't mean everything spoke the same protocol, but that every resource could be shared everywhere. you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine. indeed on any other network that gave you could login to. that is the part that's sorely missed.
  - codemac 10y ago
    If I can get the damned TV onto the network at all, then I can use 9fs or any other protocol including http. plan9 did not invent the network, or even the concept of shared resources. They focused on putting all resources into a filesystem API, entirely and exclusively. That's their innovation. I'm not being obtuse by pointing it out.
    - f2f 10y ago
      i'm not entirely sure about your timeline. plan9 came about in 1990. plenty of "sharing" back then was the unique property of distributed systems like amoeba.
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    > you're being deliberately obtuse. To me it sounds like codemac is being entirely sensible and pragmatic about what the limitations are. Pervasive "piping of bytes" is all well and good, but if you don't understand what the bytes mean, it doesn't really matter. > you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine Office network? Sure. Not try it over a WAN and suddenly it doesn't look so hot. The thing is that once you're going over the network you really need to start thinking about the effects of latency and how to compensate for it or hide it. Network transparency is a foe in this (very common) scenario.

pjc50 10y ago

everything was connected and uniform I've never been entirely clear whether this referred to 'everything within the Plan9 organisation' or 'everything visible from a Plan9 machine including external independent systems'. The former is much easier to achieve. So much of the nonuniformity is because of competing administrative domains.

knorker 10y ago
"Everything that was on my machine was uniform because I wrote it from scratch to work the way my brain works" Yeah… that doesn't scale, no matter who you are, mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".
- koluft 10y ago
  You seem so angry for such a bizarre reason.
  - Joeri 10y ago
    Maybe he used to have 'r' as login.
  - knorker 10y ago
    Irrationality and denying reality annoys me.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name". And what's that to you?
  - knorker 10y ago
    Another sign that he lives in his own arrogant world. A separate arrogant world that affects other people.

chronial 10y ago

What is new about this, is that it is none of the three things that your quote listed as possibilities. The new thing is a remote storage that has a smartly synchronized local "cache".

rakoo 10y ago
Nothing could prevent a remote filesystem to have a local cache, actually this is what every remote filesystem would implement quite soon. The real novelty of Infinit is that you can mix and match multiple storages and build a unified filesystem with encryption on top of this. Roughly something like truecrypt over aufs over (sftp+local fs+s3fs+whateveryouwantfs)

aidenn0 10y ago

On P9 at Bell labs, everything could be connected and uniform. In the real world with corporate firewalls, HTTPS is very nearly the only reliable option for connecting to other computers. On top of that, the fact that most workstations in this world do not have public IP addresses, and p2p becomes really a non-starter.

zymhan 10y ago
First of all, you can just tunnel whatever storage protocol over HTTPS if needed. The point of the quote is that we could be using Operating Systems that abstract away the various kinds of storage available so that you can use whatever combination of options work for you. It's like if everyone was using Linux and paid for plans from for example a cloud storage provider, but was able to reliably and automatically mount their storage like any other network share. With open technology and widespread fast internet, it's really not that hard to accomplish. We've already got the former. Now we just need a lot more of the latter.
chatmasta 10y ago
This seemingly destructive segmentation of the Internet is precisely what will lead to its successor: a collection of "overlay networks" built on top of the existing IP stack. We're already seeing it in many ways, with Tor and VPNs as two commonly used examples. But overlay networks are not just advantageous for packet transport. They can represent any decentralized network. BitCoin is an overlay network, in that it's literally a payment network, is a payment network, built on top of existing IP infrastructure. We are going to see more and more of these "overlays" as the Internet "re-decentralizes". Sure, what we know as "the Internet" is becoming increasingly centralized, and people are right to be concerned. But there is nothing to fear, so long as we can build more abstractions on top of the Internet as we know it. Let Amazon, Google, and the big "clouds" centralize as much of the Internet as they want. They are only digging their own grave, because the next revolution, the "Internet 2.0" will be as decentralized as its predecessor. Only instead of being built on the "dumb pipes" of copper and fiber, it will be built on the "dumb pipes" of the existing, increasingly centralized, Internet. The more the Internet infrastructure consolidates itself, the more it provides an opportunity to re-decentralize on top of it.

Aleman360 10y ago

Seems like a leaky abstraction. Did their interfaces have a way to account for differences in latency and failure modes, or was that hidden?

maaku 10y ago

Downvoted because when I click "comments" I want to see comments about the article, not some unrelated system.

codemac 10y ago

Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me. For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a blob under the same file. It makes oauth2 look decent. Saying that you managed to push everything through a file interface is interesting, but it's no more or less connected than a world of http:// http://

f2f 10y ago
you're being deliberately obtuse. the uniformity in plan9 didn't mean everything spoke the same protocol, but that every resource could be shared everywhere. you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine. indeed on any other network that gave you could login to. that is the part that's sorely missed.
- codemac 10y ago
  If I can get the damned TV onto the network at all, then I can use 9fs or any other protocol including http. plan9 did not invent the network, or even the concept of shared resources. They focused on putting all resources into a filesystem API, entirely and exclusively. That's their innovation. I'm not being obtuse by pointing it out.
  - f2f 10y ago
    i'm not entirely sure about your timeline. plan9 came about in 1990. plenty of "sharing" back then was the unique property of distributed systems like amoeba.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  > you're being deliberately obtuse. To me it sounds like codemac is being entirely sensible and pragmatic about what the limitations are. Pervasive "piping of bytes" is all well and good, but if you don't understand what the bytes mean, it doesn't really matter. > you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine Office network? Sure. Not try it over a WAN and suddenly it doesn't look so hot. The thing is that once you're going over the network you really need to start thinking about the effects of latency and how to compensate for it or hide it. Network transparency is a foe in this (very common) scenario.