9grid

The name 9grid has been used for two separate but related projects.

An early grid of Plan 9 servers at Bell Labs and the University of Calgary was called 9grid. It is generally closed and not very much used.

More recently, private individuals and organizations have created a handful of public-access servers and also use the name 9grid.

No active servers are known at the moment. Please list them here if they become available.

Each of these servers runs its own authentication domain. For accounts, see the details on the above web sites.

OPEN PROBLEMS

Open research problems remain in turning the loosely-associated collection of machines above into a true grid of machines, with cross-domain authentication, access controls, resource discovery, and perhaps even load balancing.

The rest of this page sketches proposed solutions to some of these problems.

AUTHENTICATION

We need to establish a consensus on how a griduser should be authenticated on a gridnode.

• Proposal 1: multiauthdom by 20h
• Proposal 2: factotum patch by tip9ug.
• Proposal 3: implementing SPKI

Proposal 1 and 2 seemingly agreed on assigning gridusers' name in the form of "username@authdom". Plan 9 kernel surprisingly accepts this notation. The same notation could be used on Proposal 3 too once implemented.

LOCAL FILESTORE

On gridnodes, accesses by a griduser are treated as none access to the local filesystem unless the user is registered to the filesystem. We need to offer a secure way to grant gridusers the right to store files on the gridnode. ramfs(1) can be used in many cases, but you might want to remember that Plan 9 has the 1.8GB limitation of installable memory, and also, it could be hard to do quota in ramfs.

The following proposals are to provide gridusers a way to store their files on a fossil on gridnodes. Quota on these proposals can be done by running some instance of fossil on a partition other than /dev/sdC0/fossil or on an ordinary file on the fossil from which the gridnode booted from.

• Proposal 1: create a "rwxrwxrwx sys sys" directory named by a random string and pass the secret pathname to a griduser.
• Proposal 2: make a helper program which will add the griduser on a fossil and create a "rwx------ griduser sys" directory in the fossil.

LIMITING NETWORK ACCESS

Some admins would want to restrict the gridusers to access network from the gridnode considering DDoS. We need to provide a way to give gridnodes' admins the choice if they want to give or not to give the access to the local network interface.

• Proposal 1: patch the kernel so that only the hostowner and none can access '#I' (ip(3) device) and '#l' (ether(3) device).
• Proposal 2: for gridusers, omit the binding of '#I' and '#l' to /net and set RFNOMNT. This can be done by setting up gridusers' environments properly.

SETTING UP THE GRIDUSERS' ENVIRONMENTS

We need a way to construct gridusers' environments on a gridnode. Environments means... the namespace in Plan 9.

• Proposal: patch cpu.c so that if there is "@" in the username construct the namespace according to /lib/namespace.grid. cpu.c also sets RFNOMNT if necessary.

RESOURCE DISCOVERY

We need a way to discover other 9grid nodes.

PARALLEL PROGRAMING PARADIGM

We need a version of MP adopted to 9grid framework.