# Down the rabbit hole 9front pt4

The To-Do list from my second post in this series has been completed,
other than managing to get my monitor to run at its native resolution.

Unfortunately now that I've been using 9front for a few days there are
some things I have as yet been unable to do and so the To-Do list
expanded to include the following. 


## Mounting external disks

I have a 500Gb archive drive which holds my music and other files.
The file-system is ext2 and I wanted to access my music.  I also wanted
to be able to use usb sticks.

As it turns out dos/fat32 formatted USB sticks will auto mount under /shr

For ext4 there is ext4srv(1).

Firstly you have to start the ext4srv service.

To identify your drive and partition, run the following before and
after connecting it: 
> % ls /dev/sd*

Then simply:
> % mount /srv/ext4 /n/<mount_point> /dev/sd<drive_id>/linux

I added the following to my lib/profile:

>	## Archive HDD
>	ARCH_DRIVE=/dev/sdU1c3b2/linux
>	if (test -e $ARCH_DRIVE) {
>		ext4srv
>		mount /srv/ext4 /n/archive $ARCH_DRIVE
>	}


## Ham radio logging script migration

Even though I had ported my ksh script to rc in advance, it seems that
I was still using linuxisms:

* No printf on 9front, used echo instead as no formatting needed.

* date formatting is quite different:
>	date -uf 'Y-MM-DD hh:mm:ss'
vs
>	date -u '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

I think you'll agree that the date formatting in 9front is cleaner.


## password-store

This was mild torture.  Due to already having migrated the ksh script
to rc on my OpenBSD system, I was expecting a fairly painless
migration, but no.

Things that were valid syntax on the OpenBSD implementation of rc were
not valid on 9front.  I had lots of errors about concatenation of null
lists, or something like...  I found that using $"var instead of $var
seemed to alleviate the errors and get things working.

I also had to replace sending data to xclip with /mnt/wsys/snarf and
use an alternative to gpg to encrypt and decrypt[1] the file.


## Summary

The only way to truly learn another system, and discover if it can meet
your needs, is to use it how you intend to use it and do the things you
would ordinarily do day to day.


## References

[1]( https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html#pim_pass )