I've only briefly looked at plan9 here and there over the years but you seem to have a pretty good handle on it and maybe could indulge me. Your comment raised

I've only briefly looked at plan9 here and there over the years but you seem to have a pretty good handle on it and maybe could indulge me. Your comment raised a question for me that I hadn't considered before. If I've got a Plan9 system mounted over, say, NFS, would this all mean that (ignoring permissions) I could effectively open a TCP connection from that remote machine by writing appropriate information to a file on the NFS share? It would be pretty inefficient I suspect, tunnelling TCP over NFS, but it seems like there could be an incredible amount of cool hacks that might Just Work as a side-effect of them going all-in on "everything is a file".