Since I needed this, I figured it might be useful for others. Venti can be used with files on your Fossil as backing storage. There is no steadfast need to create partitions for Venti to run (and in some cases, this configuration may even be more convenient, for example when you're on a laptop with frequently added and erased data). I was bitten by a couple of problems that I figured out after reading the manpages several times, so I'll list them here so that you don't have to.

My first step was to create the index file. I have no idea how large this needs to be, mathematically, compared to the size of the Venti arena. I suppose it would be something like:

(arena_size / arena_block_size) / x

Where x is however large a Venti index datastructure is. I could find this if I read the paper or source, but I'm too lazy right now.

To create these files, I simply ran:

	% dd -if /dev/zero -of isect0 -bs 8192 -count 10000
	% dd -if /dev/zero -of arenas0 -bs 8192 -count 40000

When these completed, the following files were present:

	--rw-rw-r-- M 8 dho dho 327680000 Apr  3 20:10 arenas0
	--rw-rw-r-- M 8 dho dho  81920000 Apr  3 20:10 isect0

After this, I simply created a venti.conf file that was the same as the one in the manpage:

	% cat > venti.conf
	index main
	isect /usr/dho/isect0
	arenas /usr/dho/arenas0
	
	%

Then I had the task of formatting these files. First I ran:

	% venti/fmtisect isect0 isect0

This took a little while. In retrospect, I could have used -Z, since I created this file with /dev/zero. The -Z flag tells fmtisect and fmtarenas to not zero the ``partition'' first, which is superfluous since we created the files from zero.

After this, I ran:

	% venti/fmtarenas arenas0 arenas0

I should have used -Z here as well. Hereafter,

	% venti/fmtindex venti.conf

Yay, all's well, right?

	% venti/venti -c /usr/dho/venti.conf
	% venti=127.0.0.1
	% vac -f test.vac testfile

Instead of getting anything useful, I got some error about how I had no space in my arena. This didn't make much sense until I read the fmtarenas section of the manpage a few more times: Venti creates its arenas with a default size of 500MB. Mine's smaller, and since it didn't fulfill the size requirement, I didn't get _any_ Venti storage. Lame.

So, I went back through and ran:

	% venti/fmtisect isect0 isect0
	% venti/fmtarenas -a 327680000 arenas0 arenas0
	% venti/fmtindex venti.conf

I didn't use -Z here, since the fmtindex actually writes to the index file. (And I wasn't sure if it wrote to the arenas file too). The -a flag specifies a size other than 512MB to use for the arena. Apparently this value should always be set to the size of the arena file or partition. (Fancy that!)

After this:

	% vac -f test.vac test
	packet: 1/9 frag: 1/6 small mem: 1/1 big mem: 1/8
	% ls -l
	d-rwxrwxr-x M 8 dho dho  0 Apr  3 19:15 test
	--rw-rw-r-- M 8 dho dho 45 Apr  3 20:10 test.vac
	% cat test.vac
	vac:d3d2b67810fb0fc289073c4b0c3ac6d9b01010fb

Hope that's useful to someone.

--dho

Does this procedure basically work on Plan 9 Port for Unix-like systems as well? (Dave Leimbach)