Installing 9front at OVH by Stanley Lieber The hosting service provided by ovh.ie includes dedicated servers characterized by cheap hardware bundled with high bandwidth. A limited number of operating systems are officially supported, while technical support is minimal and direct console access is not provided. The following instructions detail the steps needed to install 9front through the provided virtual console. First, select a Linux variant (in this example, Slackware) as the operating system. After the system is installed, obtain the IP address, subnet mask and default gateway, either from the installed system or the OVH web console. Next, netboot vKVM and start the virtual machine via ftp with the following ISO image: ftp://pop.inri.net/pub/9front/9front3.iso Install 9front with a systype of cpu. During the configether step, choose manual and enter the correct values issued by OVH. Reboot the installed system inside vKVM with fshalt -r. Set the $sysname you chose during install near the top of /rc/bin/cpurc: sysname=cirno <- or whatever Create /cfg/$sysname/cpurc, substituting the correct values issued by OVH: #!/bin/rc ip/ipconfig -g ether /net/ether0 In /lib/ndb/local, comment out the line containing your $sysname. Assuming an auth/cpu machine named cirno.9front, with an IP address of 91.121.181.189 and a default gateway of 91.121.181.254 that are on the Class C network 91.121.181.0.0/24, and a DNS server of 8.8.8.8, add the following files to /lib/ndb/local: auth=cirno.9front authdom=9front ipnet=9front ip=91.121.181.0 ipmask=255.255.255.0 auth=cirno.9front cpu=cirno.9front dns=8.8.8.8 sys=cirno dom=cirno.9front ip=91.121.181.189 ipmask=255.255.255.0 ipgw=91.121.181.254 Note: authdom should match what was entered during the cpu install. Create the empty file /adm/keys.who. Run auth/keyfs. Create the desired users on the file server and auth server. In the OVH web console, change the boot method from vKVM to hd. Shutdown 9front with fshalt, then click Reboot vKVM from the vKVM viewer. If this does not seem to work, request a hard reboot form the OVH web console. After a while the system should come back up and should now be accessible via cpu. Cpu to the system as glenda and reconfigure as follows: Remove the line you added to /rc/bin/cpurc (the one that sets $sysname). Obtain the machine's hardware Ethernet MAC address: cat /net/ether0/addr and add it to the line in /lib/ndb/local that contains your $sysname: sys=cirno dom=cirno.9front ether=00270e0d8860 ip=91.121.181.189 ipmask=255.255.255.0 ipgw=91.121.181.254 Reboot with fshalt -r. This time, the system should recognize its MAC address in /lib/ndb/local and configure its networking accordingly. Note: OVH's vKVM cannot seem to handle the full-size 9front ISO image. As a result, the custom image used above omits some files. The installed system will have empty directories in /sys/src and /dist/plan9front. These can be populated by copying from the full ISO image available here: http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/mirrors