FS(4) FS(4)
NAME
fs - file server, bootes
SYNOPSIS
none
DESCRIPTION
The file server is the main file system for Plan 9. It is a
stand-alone system that runs on a separate computer. It
serves the Plan 9 protocol on a variety of networks includ-
ing Datakit/URP, Ethernet IL/IP and Cyclone fiber direct
connections. The name of this machine is bootes.
Bootes can use an external authentication server to validate
clients. Because the authentication server itself uses
bootes as a file server, though, to avoid chicken-and-egg
problems bootes usually authenticates its own connections.
Thus when changes are made to the authentication server's
database it is necessary to run auth (see fs(8)) to update
bootes's internal state.
The user none is always allowed to attach to bootes without
authentication but has minimal permissions.
Bootes maintains three file systems on a combination of
disks and write-once-read-many (WORM) magneto-optical disks.
other
is a simple disk-based file system similar to kfs(4).
main is a worm-based file system with a disk-based look-
aside cache. The disk cache holds modified worm blocks
to overcome the write-once property of the worm. The
cache also holds recently accessed non-modified blocks
to speed up the effective access time of the worm.
Occasionally (usually daily at 5AM) the modified blocks
in the disk cache are dumped. At this time, traffic to
the file system is halted and the modified blocks are
relabeled to the un-written portion of the worm. After
the dump, the file system traffic is continued and the
relabeled blocks are copied to the worm by a background
process.
dump Each time the main file system is dumped, its root is
appended to a subdirectory of the dump file system.
Since the dump file system is not mirrored with a disk
cache, it is read-only. The name of the newly added
root is created from the date of the dump: /yyyy/mmdds.
Here yyyy is the full year, mm is the month number, dd
is the day number and s is a sequence number if more
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FS(4) FS(4)
than one dump is done in a day. For the first dump, s
is null. For the subsequent dumps s is 1, 2, 3 etc.
The root of the main file system that is frozen on the
first dump of March 1, 1992 will be named /1992/0301/
in the dump file system.
EXAMPLES
Place the root of the dump file system on /n/dump and show
the modified times of the mips C compiler over all dumps in
February, 1992:
9fs dump
ls -l /n/dump/1992/02??/mips/bin/vc
To get only one line of output for each version of the com-
piler:
ls -lp /n/dump/1992/02??/mips/bin/vc | uniq
Make the other file system available in directory
/n/bootesother:
mount -ct /srv/boot /n/bootesother other
SEE ALSO
yesterday(1), srv(4), fs(8)
Sean Quinlan, A Cached WORM File System, Software - Practice
and Experience, December, 1991
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