[ Thanks to BR for
this link. ]
“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.”