Ragnar

Want to read ancient history of past Ragnars?

Ragnar's name came from the book Atlas Shrugged. In the book, Ragnar Danneskjöld is the most obscure of the three characters who form the nucleus of the book. He is a philosopher who has become a pirate to defend the world from government thieves and thugs. Of course, I now associate the name much more closely with my computer than I do with the book.

As far as hardware, Ragnar is currently a 1.8GHz Duron with 128M of RAM, though 32M of that is used for shared video memory. (I should have another stick of 256M that he could use lying around somewhere, but I have to find it, and it doesn't seem to have been that much of a problem yet … ) He has an Intel PRO/1000MT network card; the other components (video, sound) are onboard. He's in a black Micro-ATX case. He has an 80G Maxtor hard drive that I had lying around, and no optical drive, because it wouldn't do anything for him. He sits quietly under my amplifier waiting for a request to come in so he can act on it. There are actually a monitor and keyboard connected to him, but they're rarely on and rarely used, respectively.

Ragnar is currently running OpenBSD 3.5. My web scripting is done with mod_perl. Ragnar also runs OpenSSH (an essential component for a headless server), mutt, fetchmail, postfix, and a few other odds and ends.

Ragnar's function is more or less as a headless server. He runs the webserver from which you're reading this page.

I think of Ragnar (if he were a human being) as being in his mid to late 40's. He's fairly unemotional—he cares mostly about getting the job done. He's a no-nonsense kind of computer. Ragnar would never put up with running Windows or anything like it, with its glitzy non-functionality. Linux or BSD both suit him just fine—although I think in OpenBSD I've found the perfect match for his personality.


Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sun Aug 29 10:55:49 2004