Monday 1 June 2009 - New Release Cycle begins!
Well, we've got a new version of the qemu-based grid tools up - it provides a lot of new functionality, flexibility, and hopefully ease-of-use. We haven't really started documenting everything that's going on with it, and we are going to be rolling out new services related to its design during the upcoming weeks. The image and tools itself should start getting more frequent updates and we are hoping to leverage Venti and other Plan 9 based tools to do so.
If you already have access to a linux machine, the new base version of the image provides what we hope is pretty neat out-of-the box functionality - you extract the .tgz, cd into your new gridtools directory, and run (as root) a simple iptables script to redirect some low ports to high ports for the qemu VM to access without root privileges. The gridlord script (run as normal user inside the extraced directory, no install required) then provides a simple menu-based interface to control a full distributed plan9 system all on your local machine. Fire up a VM and let it boot in cpu server mode, then drawterm in as bootes, glenda, or gridna with password: gridpass. The VM image itself is meta-pre-configured - check out the /cfg directory, which holds relatively self-descriptive configurations for multiple machine roles. /usr/bootes/bin/rc contains confighelper -- a wrapper for an set of configuration helper scripts designed to let you quickly and easily control some administrative variables. Please note that right now this is an ad-hoc set of recipes based on the base configuration we provide. We hope to develop it into a more general purpose Plan 9 configuration utility, but it is currently not recommended for use with anything other than the 9gridchan.org preconfigured qemu image.
There are several other customizations and extras included in the image - and source code to everything, of course. /usr/grid is a 'non-login' user whose directories contain some of the grid tools. /usr/grid/src and /usr/bootes/lib have most of the additonal materials, along with /usr/grid/bin/rc and /usr/grid/bin/386 - these directories are bound in during most user's profiles, except glenda. We left Glenda basically untouched from the Bell Labs setup in this image. Thanks to everyone who helped test and offered suggestions for this version of the tools, and we look forward to improving it further according to user suggestions. As of the time of this posting, the surrounding documentation and web resources are still mostly un-updated so things like the walkthrough screenshots gallery still apply to the old version of the image.