This junk goes into /usr/net. That name is built into several programs. You should have the following files: friends fshare magic people setup teardown unmount The files friends, setup, teardown, and unmount have to do with you being able to look at files on other machines. The files fshare, magic, and people have to do with your file system being visible to others. Friends is a table read by setup and teardown. It contains information on the machines you want to talk to. The fields are: machine name (spelled peculiarly, see below), mount point (where you want the other machine's file system to appear in yours), device number (start at 48 or 64 and go up by one), and a debugging flag. For each line in friends, setup tries to mount that file system at the mount point. It then sends keep alive messages to each machine. When it can't talk to a machine it tries to unmount the file system. Sending it a 1 signal (kill -1 ...) causes it to reread /usr/net/friends, and connect to all the machines it is not connected to. It also tries every 20 minutes, and within a minute after /usr/net/friends is touched. This need not succeed for there are several inconvenient failure states. Teardown is a shell script which tries to dismount all the network file systems. Fshare provides service to others. There's a parent one, and one for each machine connected to you. /usr/net/people is your idea of the permissions you want to grant to others using your file system. The entries are sorted by machine. The entries are pairs of pairs, each pair being a user id and a group id. The first pair in a pair is the other machine's idea and the second represents yours. For instance, mh/astro/seki (( 27 1) (814 2)) # pjw means that user 27 on seki should be treated as having uid 814 and group 2 on your machine. The stuff after # is a comment. Default versions of this file can be constructed using the shell script magic. magic machine-name produces a file of pairs for the people who have the same login name on your machine and machine-name. Run magic seki and put its output after the last line of people, which should be mh/astro/seki Similarly to include permissions for a machine named junko, magic junko then edit /usr/net/people to have mh/cage/junko (or whatever) as its last line, and then add junko-done (the output of magic junko). The friends file contains names of directories where other machine's file systems will be mounted. Corresponding to the name /n/foo in /usr/net/friends, there must be a directory /n/foo. The code here assumes it is talking to Datakit in several places. If you want to use another network, you'll have to fix things. The only true requirement is that there be a stream driver for the network.