Frankenlinux: Winner of the Dell server

By ADAM GAFFIN
Network World Fusion, 08/05/99

We have a winner!

Paula Hinchliffe of Seal Master Corp. in Kent, Ohio, wins the Dell PowerEdge 1300 departmental server with this story:

I gave birth... memories from the proud parents
We needed a firewall between the e-mail server and the outside world. We didn't know how we were going to get approval to buy additional equipment and were working on a scheme to get it through. We consulted our Linux guru Art ... for a low-cost solution (read basically free). He suggested the purchase of a bare bones system for this application. Try as we might, we could not arrange the funding for this latest adventure.
One of the engineers, who is an adventurer at heart, and I decided that all of the pieces/ parts systems around here that we have been hoarding for that 'just in case' time would come in handy. We went from office to office, closet to closet salvaging what we could from machines that had either been broken by the users or the common lightening strike.
At the end of our search, we had a 386 case, a hard drive that we had spent more time than either of us will dare to admit attempting to resuscitate, two network combo cards (each with a different port damaged), RAM that had been basically stolen from machines that we felt didn't need it, a 4x CD-ROM, a keyboard missing most of the important keys, a monitor that only worked if you taped the power button down, and a mouse with no buttons. It was a sad lot. We were determined to make this work. Using company time, and a lot of ingenuity, we put this machine together, installed Linux. And the server now known as Frankenlinux was born. Frankie for short. It has been four months since our creation got its first users and permissions and there have been no problems to report.
We're thinking about making him a bride.

Choosing this story as the winner was no easy task for our panel of judges, several of whom have vowed to never again volunteer for such a grueling task. We received some 200 entries and many of them were exactly what we were looking for: stories that would make us run into News Editor Bob Brown's office and yell "hey Bob, lookit this" (Brown eventually resorted to turning off his office light and closing his door to make us think he wasn't in). Some of those were even suitable for a family newspaper.

What won it for Hinchliffe was the sheer tragicomedy of her story - the Mel-Brooksian angst of Frankenlinux's creation. We could almost picture Marty Feldman scavenging for server parts.

Runner-ups
Other names and stories we liked

Certain themes emerged in the competition:

Cartoon characters are popular. Disney, The Simpsons, South Park, Animaniacs and Scooby Doo all have characters with servers across the country named for them. Sesame Street and Pokemon are also big, as are print cartoons, in particular Dilbert (like that's a suprise) and Calvin and Hobbes. We were surprised to see a relative absence of "Looney Tunes" characters - no servers named Bugs, Daffy or Elmer.

Science fiction/fantasy also provided many names. Is there any network in corporate America that doesn't have at least one server named for a character in Tolkien, Star Trek or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Asimov's Foundation series was an interesting dark-horse candidate.

Also very popular: revenge. A number of you used your rapier-like wit to get back at obnoxious users, naming machines rtfm. Our two favorites, though: The guy who, when told a user objected to a server named beelzebub numbered the user's network segment 666 ("the devil really is in the details," he wrote), and the guys who, when they started their own company, named servers after hated former bosses so they could take pleasure in turning them off.

Of course, we can't get away from sex and body parts in this culture, not even with server names. Most network managers are men, so it's no surprise there are servers out there named for Baywatch characters and super-models. But one female network manager got her revenge by naming boxes after handsome male actors. Way too many of you have named servers "Uranus" - for just the reason the rest of you think.

"Titanic" was a moderately popular name for NT servers - one user named a backup system Carpathia (for the ship that rescued the survivors). We admit to admiring the guy who named a new NT box UNIX.