Re: What's your computer's name? [OT]
From: TTK Ciar (ttk_at_remove_this_and_all_after_org.ciar.org.rcsis.com)
Date: 02/23/04
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Date: 23 Feb 2004 02:02:43 GMT
My first installation was 0.98pl14, and I don't remember what I
called that computer .. it spent most of its time booted into OS/2
anyway. I didn't really transition to Linux until much later, and
then I used the Slackware 3.0 CDROM that came with the book I'd
bought, _Linux Unleashed_.
By that time (1995? 1996? not sure), my personal workstation was
named Cthulhu, and was an AMD 486DX3/120. I'd gotten into the habit
of naming my beefy boxes after beefy mythical/fantasy figures, and
my less-beefy boxes after mythical creatures.
Later I added a P133 named "Hastur", also running Slack 3.0.
When I worked at Cygnus, they provided me with a Solaris machine
(Xiombarg), but it was dependent on company DNS/NFS/etc and I didn't
have root access. I wanted a machine that could keep on chugging
when some critical network service broke (as they inevitably did),
and which was mine to configure. Again, Slack3.0, on a 486DX-33
named gaia.
Gaia's motherboard went bad, so I broke it up for parts to make
two more machines -- goblin and arioch. Goblin was the home LAN's
firewall/PPP-router machine, and it ran just dandy on a 386SX-25
with a 40MB hard drive (16MB of which was swap) and 4MB of RAM.
I received a gift of a Sun IPX, which I named Cenobite and set
up as a thin client to run upstairs, running applications on the
Linux box downstairs via X11R4 on SunOS 4.1.3_U1.
Arioch supplanted Hastur, and inherited the P133. It became my
personal workstation, as my housemates liked Cthulhu booted into
DOS to play games. On Arioch, I played around with RedHat for a
while through the 2.0.x kernel dark times, then tried some other
distributions. When Slackware 7.1 came out, I ran back to it.
With DSL and the need to provide my wife with appletalk service
(she's a Mac user) came the need to put goblin to pasture .. it
became the new gaming DOS box (no more WarCraft or Descent, but
it played StarCon-1, WarZone, and Cribbage quite well), and then
Arioch took its place as the gateway.
At Flying Crocodile, I wanted to run my own server for web, ftp,
and email, so I put together a rack-mounted 2U box named Darkness.
It also a P133, and ran Slackware 7.1.
Cthulhu had finally died, so I got myself yet another P133 and
called it Typhon (after the last and greatest of the Titans), also
a Slack7.1 box.
Somewhere in there I was playing with Alphas, three 166MHz 20166
Multias, and gave them the names Lolth, Drider, and Ungoliant.
Some $20-$40 laptops came and went .. Most of them insufficient
to run Linux. They were DOS boxes, sufficient for text editing on
the bus on the way to work and back. My two most recent were
named Stormbringer (Slack 7.1) and Gammaknife (Slack 8.0, and then
Slack 8.1). Gammaknife was supposed to be my wife's laptop (she
has learned some Linux skills, and wanted a laptop, but didn't
want to shell out the $$$ for a Mac laptop), but she eventually
gave it back to me and I kept the name. "Gammaknife" was a break
from my usual naming pattern because she thinks they're corny.
The name came from the technique the doctors used to burn out
her acoustic neuroma a few years earlier -- essentially two
crossing beams of gamma radiation which individually pass through
tissue without effect, but cauterize tissue where they intersect,
thus allowing surgery on tumors without having to cut patients'
skins (pretty nifty).
Slackware 8.0 was a disaster, so I limped on applying security
patches to 7.1 until I could try 8.1, which seemed okay on my
laptop. I installed 8.1 on the home firewall (still arioch), and
it was great. IPCHAINS especially, but IP-aliasing and dhcpd too.
I tried it at work, where it replaced some FreeBSD 4.3 machines,
and did great, even under heavy load (MySQL, Apache, Perl). And
then finally on Typhon, which I'd since upgraded to a 700MHz Athlon
(classic).
So to summarize this..
Cthulhu ------ Slack 3.0, OS/2 2.1 + 2.2 + 3.0 + 4.0, DOS 5.0
Hastur ------- Slack 3.0, DOS 5.0
Xiombarg ----- Solaris 2.5.1
Gaia --------- Slack 3.0
Cenobite ----- SunOS 4.1.3_U1
Goblin ------- Slack 3.0, DOS 5.0
Arioch ------- Slack 3.0, (many others *), Slack 7.1, Slack 8.1
Darkness ----- Slack 7.1, FreeBSD 4.1
Ungoliant ---- RedHat 5.1 for DEC Alpha
Lolth -------- RedHat 5.1 for DEC Alpha
Drider ------- RedHat 5.1 for DEC Alpha
Stormbringer - Slack 7.1, DOS 5.0
Gammaknife --- Slack 7.1 + 8.0 + 8.1, DOS 5.0
Typhon ------- Slack 7.1, FreeBSD 4.3, Slack 8.1
(* Arioch's many other OS's: RedHat 5.0, RedHat 5.1, Debian,
SuSE, FreeBSD 3.5, and FreeBSD 4.1)
Of those, Arioch, Cenobite, Drider, Gammaknife, and Typhon still
exist, though Cenobite and Drider are in cardboard boxes somewhere
in storage. Arioch is still the home LAN-server, Gammaknife is
down pending a hard drive replacement, and Typhon is what I'm on
right now.
There were some other machines (Centaur, Cyclops, Succubus, and
Gnoll), but they were all non-*nix (DOS, eCos, or ZuulOS).
The machines at work are unimaginatively named: box1 - box5,
though box3 (the web server) is also named "Hardpoint". All five
were transitioned over from FreeBSD 4.x to Slackware 8.1. I am
currently considering whether to try spinning our own distribution
based on Slackware 8.1, or just patch it piecemeal while we wait
and see how Slackware 9.2/10.x looks. I will also be testing
Buffalo, SentryFirewall, and Zeus (all Slackware-derived -- there
is simply not enough time to try more distributions, and as long
as I'm choosing, I'd might as well pick from those based on a
solid Slackware foundation).
I also recently started working at the Internet Archive, where
we're about to transition from a totally-hacked-up RedHat 7.1 to
Debian. The sysadmins there seem to value features more than
stability.
-- TTK
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