This stuff is about old Ragnar. Read about new Ragnar.
I got Ragnar as part of a job I had over the summer of 1999. The job involved web design to run on a Linux system. I didn't have internet access at home, and anyway, it seemed that it would be much more efficient for me to work off of a local network. So, the man I was working for lent me one of his old computers to do the development on. When the time came to work out payment, he said I could keep that computer in lieu of a fairly small amount of money (about $100, I think—maybe less). I cheerfully accepted, of course.
Ragnar was a 486 DX2/66 with 36M of RAM. His motherboard had the fairly uncommon property of accepting unmatched RAM sticks, which explained the somewhat odd amount. He originally had a 400M hard disk, but that died relatively early on; then he had a 3G drive which he'd had almost the whole time I'd had him, and an 80G drive of which he only seemed to be able to access 8G due to BIOS limitation (the one component donated to new Ragnar). He had a 3c509 ethernet card. He had no end of problems with 3 previous ethernet cards, but that one worked fine. He had an onboard video card and standard CD-ROM and 3.5" floppy drives. His case wass a beautiful, extremely thin desktop model which says “NEC PowerMate 466D” on the side (hinting at his lineage) and his power supply was I believe a 200W AT one with a dead or almost-dead fan.
Ragnar ran OpenBSD 3.2. (He still runs OpenBSD, but a newer version now.) He ran Redhat Linux for a long time—originally it was 6.0, then 6.2. I never moved to 7.0 due to numerous problems a friend of mine reported with it, and just never bothered with 7.1 or 7.2. I thought switching him to OpenBSD would be more work—his webserver ended up having only 3 hours or so of downtime. Actually, the worst part of it was wondering where the Apache package was and then realizing it was already installed by default. :-) Apache is the most popular web server on the 'net (and here's hoping the numerous security holes in IIS keep it that way).
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sun Aug 29 10:55:46 2004