Can your OS do this ? part 1

I've got two Plan 9 servers : eric and plum on 192.168.254.1 and 192.168.9.9
Two Lunix servers : storm (debian etch) and momo (OpenSBD) on 10.0.0.1 and 192.168.9.14

eric is running in qemu on storm, storm is behind n NATs (where n > 1)
storm gets its external ip via DHCP from the first NAT on the subnet 192.168.52.0
storm runs VDE on the 192.168.254.0 subnet, eric sees storm as 192.168.254.254
storm is not internet facing

< here lies the internet >

plum is behind a NAT but is port forwarded, plum's ip is 192.168.9.9
momo is on the same subnet
eric think's plum's IP is the external one

eric import(4)s storm's file system at boot, its path is /n/storm_root
eric union bind(1)s /n/storm_root/home/plan9/bin to /bin, effectively putting that directory in the path

then eric executes srv_eric

which redirects to the file located at /n/storm/bin/srv_eric
which redirects to the file located at /n/storm_root/home/plan9/bin/srv_eric
which is really on the machine storm as /home/plan9/bin/srv_eric

it contains :

#!/bin/rc
rm -f /srv/ericnet # in case it's run again after boot
srvfs ericnet /net # export eric's network
cpu -h plum -c /mnt/term/bin/eric_arrived

the cpu command logs into plum's IP via port forwarding and when it gets a shell it executes /mnt/term/bin/eric_arrived

eric_arrived is also in /home/plan9/bin on storm, cpu takes its namespace with it into /mnt/term

#!/bin/rc
rm -f /srv/ericnet # in case this is a reconnect
mount /mnt/term/srv/ericnet /n/ericnet # mount eric's srv entry for this script to use
srvfs ericnet /n/ericnet # export it again so everyone can see it in /srv
chmod 666 /srv/ericnet # make it available for r/w
read # keep it alive

I log into into plum (with cpu or drawterm or whatever)
in my lib/profile I have

get_eric

which is actually at /n/momo/home/plab9/bin/get_eric and contains :

#!/bin/rc
mount /srv/ericnet /net.alt
srv /net.alt/tcp!storm!9fs /n/storm_root

which mount's eric's network on /net.alt
and then uses that network connection to mount storm's file system on plum

We can use eric's network for all the usual stuff i.e.

plum% ip/ping -n 1 /net.alt/icmp!10.0.0.2
sending 1 64 byte messages 1000 ms apart to /net.alt/icmp!10.0.0.1!1
0: rtt 148045 µs, avg rtt 148045 µs, ttl = 64
plum%

The only problem I have at the moment is that eric doesn't notice when plum goes away, both LANs are unreliable.

I think there might be a better way of doing all this, I'm hoping this blog post will help me reveal it, after all, I only just worked all this out for the first time. I've not had a remote Plan 9 box before. I looked an aan but I can't quite see how to use it for this.