This is the life story of Nodens, my favorite Linux box. If you look at this page you'll see that it must stand out in some manner with regards to my other Linux boxes. (I have, and have had, several.)
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One day, in a state far far above sea level, a medium sized company set out to make an ambitious product: a combination drive consisting of a 3.5" floppy drive and a tape drive. To accomplish this goal, the company obviously needed some computing horsepower to design their product. They purchased many systems, new and old, to help develop and sell it. In the end, the business was not as successful as had been hoped and the belongings of the company were auctioned off to the public. Enter: another small company, this one buying computers to help develop some Internet software. A lot of 12 computers was purchased: a P-90, several 486's and two small 386's. One of these 386's was little Nodens waiting to be put to work. When Nodens was first assembled, it was to test various pieces of hardware and to run FreeBSD to do some software porting. After a short period of time, all of the hardware had been tested and the FreeBSD port had been dropped, so it was time for something different. Equipped with a 386/40 processor, 8MB of RAM, a 200MB hard drive and an ethernet card, Nodens went to work safeguarding the network on the outside of the company's firewall. He tried his hardest, but the FreeBSD OS was just a little too bulky for him. He spent too much time swapping out on tiny tasks and couldn't keep up with his duties. Something had to change. After a short vacation, Nodens returned to work armed with a new version of Red Hat Linux and a fresh new kernel which he compiled himself. With a finely tuned kernel and a wealth of utilities to attack his job with, and he did so with gusto. In fact, he worked reliably for more than half a year before taking a break. During this break, he was moved to a new facility, after which he went right back to work for another six months. Day and night he toiled; checking the health and welfare of machines both local and far flung, keeping an eye out for malicious packets, alerting his masters of anything suspicious, keeping track of who came and went, investigating routing problems and generally helping folks out. After a period of time, he was even equipped with a camera with which to keep an eye on the physical plane of the machine room in which he spent his physical existence. Never once was he snuck past nor was he crashed. He also communicated in a secure fashion so as not to be overheard by others. After spending more than a year keeping a trustworty eye out on his local network, Nodens' master received a new commission and moved to another company. With his master gone, and the old company's faith in Linux undermined by the insidious ways of the evil empire, Nodens left with him. Since that time, Nodens has faithfully served doing the same job, only in a much decreased capacity. The network upon which he now resides houses less than 20 computers and has a dynamic link to the Internet which he does not control himself. True, it is an easier life, but when one retires, especially at such an advanced age as that of Nodens, an easier life is to be desired. Now, most of his time is spent in pleasant conversation, toolshop putterings and helping to solve brain teasers. To help with the brain teasers a bit, he now has 32MB of RAM. Other than that, he is physically the same as when he started out in life.
Once again, only this time in English?
Ok, I apologize for the literary license above. I probably shouldn't
listen to Wagner when writing web pages. Nodens did work for more than
a year, watching my DMZ with tools such as tcpdump, sniffit, ICMP utils,
packet capturing tools and a bevy of Perl scripts. He ran a Secure Shell
daemon (sshd) to accept connections and at one time used a modem to send
alpha-numeric pages for alerts. Some of his daily duties included:
All of these things coming together is part of why Nodens has been my favorite Linux box since I've had him. As a comparison, I have a P-133 with a bunch of stuff that is a smoking fast machine, an AXP equipped Multia/UDB that I used as a primary workstation at work for more than a year and several production servers and firewalls that have all been hard and reliable workers. Sure, all of these other machines have been faster, some by orders of magnitude, but none of them has yet to be as cool as Nodens. This little guy worked harder at what he did, and did it without complaint for a long time. That and he was basically free (I didn't pay the $100, the company did). How much cooler can you get? |