Stuff that doesn't work in the native p9 port of netpipe (gosh, is it ever ugly in that code!): port -- netpipe for p9 defaults to 5555. I suggest you use that setsockopt -- useless in p9 printing debug information -- this is set to 1 all the time, turning it on has no effect maybe some other things that don't work when attempted, may be buffer size or whatnot so, simply mk, on the client side do: 8.out -r on the server side do: 8.out -t -h <client hostname> and enjoy :)