Advanced Namespace Tools blog

17 December 2016

Status of ANTS code, files, and web documentation

Code

The work I have been doing for the past few months is only available currently in source code form at https://bitbucket.org/mycroftiv/antsexperiments. This repo should build/install/work with 9front revision 5625. 9front has added new authentication mechanisms and versions of the utilities such as rcpu/rimport. ANTS works with these, but the documentation still mostly refers to the older auth/cpu/import commands (which still work).

Downloads

Downloads such as the ants2.1.tgz and the uncompressed version of the 9front iso for vultr installs date from 2015 and do not include these more recent additions. The plan9ants bitbucket repo corresponds to these older versions. There are also copies of these older versions in places like Bell Labs contrib and 9front extra.

Documentation

The documentation has several historical layers. http://doc.9gridchan.org/them was written to match the 2015 downloads, as was the main 9gridchan.org landing page. The “antfarm” material relates to QEMU vm images created in 2013 for the ANTS initial release. The manpages were also written in 2013, but I believe their information is still mostly accurate, if slightly incomplete. The internal documentation within the repo is somewhat disorganized, and often unclear if it is referring to the 9front or older Bell Labs methods for installing and configuring.

Archives

I still host older downloads and documentation from previous eras of 9gridchan, which can be found at http://www.9gridchan.org/archive/9grid_node_img and following links from there. None of this stuff gets any current use or testing that I know of, but it does exist. However, references to publicly available resources like an open Venti serverm, Inferno registry, are out of date. At some point I’d like to start providing free public Plan 9 services again, but am not doing so currently.