Combining The Design Concepts
Though interesting on their own, the design concepts of Plan 9 were supposed to be most useful when combined together. For example, to implement a network address translation (NAT) server, a union directory can be created, overlaying the router's /net directory tree with its own /net. Similarly, a virtual private network (VPN) can be implemented by overlaying in a union directory a /net hierarchy from a remote gateway, using secured 9P over the public Internet. A union directory with the /net hierarchy and filters can be used to sandbox an untrusted application or to implement a firewall. In the same manner, a distributed computing network can be composed with a union directory of /proc hierarchies from remote hosts, which allows interacting with them as if they are local.
When used together, these features allow for assembling a complex distributed computing environment by reusing the existing hierarchical name system.
Read more about this topic: Plan 9 From Bell Labs
Famous quotes containing the words combining, design and/or concepts:
“Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)