Another silly historical document by John Flynn!
As you may know, Linux is now prevalent here at FIU-SCS. Most of our server-side computing is done on Linux, with some Solaris still remaining, and we have dozens of Linux workstations deployed to faculty and students who want to use this great open operating system.
It wasn't always like this, though. When I arrived here in late 1996, my Linux experience was part of my resume, and thus, one of my first jobs ever as a newbie student worker was to get Linux installed on a set of new machines that had just been deployed to the Graduate Lab, then in ECS 268.
The machines were all Pentium 133MHz boxes with 64MB of RAM. The very first one I installed, with Redhat 4.2, became my first official workstation in the department, and was named "vixen.cs.fiu.edu". The other two were named "fossil" and "sarabi"; fossil also became a staff machine soon after, and sarabi was eventually re-named, because I wanted the name "sarabi" back for my own use since my home systems were on the FIU-SCS network for a time, through ISDN.
Back then, my "office" was in the graduate lab, in the back of the room. Since I was part-time, sometimes a student would be sitting at vixen using it when I arrived, and I would have to kick him off so I could get to work. I started locking the machine, and eventually was moved to a staff area so I wouldn't have to deal with that anymore.
As the years went by, I made an effort to grab every spare disk I could find and install it on vixen. It became somewhat of a running joke in the sys group; "Better pick up that disk before John gets his mitts on it!" Vixen eventually had around seven physical disks in and on it! The space came in handy for lots of things; I even purchased my own disk to install in it to keep my MP3 collection, so it wouldn't take up space on department-owned disks.
Today, vixen is a fileserver running Redhat Linux 7.3, and a newer machine, uzuri, is my main workstation. It still sits at my desk, though, with three internal disks, three external SCSI disks, a tape drive and a CD-writer hanging off it. I plan to keep it around forever; even though it's been upgraded a couple of times since its inception, vixen was the first Linux box in the department, and that does hold some distinction!
--John Flynn (flynnj at cs.fiu.edu) (this HTML document is stored on vixen!) 4/27/2004
Update 4/2/2014 - Holy shit, ten years later, and yes vixen still exists! It's considerably simpler now, just a Dell PC with a single 300GB hard drive, but the tradition has stayed alive.
Update 1/29/2021 - Yep, vixen's still there. Now it's a tiny Dell SFF machine with a 256GB SSD. It still serves as the main machine I usually log into for general shell tasks at work.