Proposal for Inter9

[jrmu <jrmu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings mkf,

I came up with an idea that I believe will solve high-delay networking.
It is entirely inspired by your us.cloud9p.org caching server!

To solve the issue of high-delay networking, we divide the world into
different regions: USA, Europe, Russia, China, Iran, Africa

Within a region, networking proceeds at normal speeds using regular unix
technology. SSH, ftp, tcp/ip, webrtc etc all work as normal.
However to cross from one region to another requires traversing a
firewall which breaks the old unix technology.

Solution: Use plan 9 as a filesystem cache

It's too hard to change end user behavior, as we see from our
discussions with stubborn sysadmins. They are stuck in their ways and
insist on ssh + curses applications and operating mouseless.

Any solution that is offered must necessarily involve supporting legacy
interactive applications like vi, tmux, and irssi. But, how can we offer
high delay networking with applications that are inherently interactive?
How can we convert ssh into a batch processing protocol?

I suggest creating a caching server that duplicates the entire
filesystem. One region has a caching server (one might call the 'staging
server') and the other has the production server. Whenever
connectivity is restored, the two are sync'd in batch mode.

CWFS might provide what is necessary, or at least can inspire new
filesystems that can easily handle this type of remote caching and
syncing.

Users that interact with the caching/staging server will be able to use
the exact same traditional unix protocols they are used to: ssh, telnet,
irc. The exact same, unchanged protocol data traverses the wire within a
region.

The only thing that needs to be done is to add these caching servers and
to connect them together using Plan 9. The routing across regions will
be handled by the Inter9.

-- 
jrmu
IRCNow (https://ircnow.org)

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