Bollskag
Bollskag (or Bôllskåg) is named after a fierce monster from David R. Palmer's book 'Emergence'. Bollskag was bought in 1997 when I first arrived in Hong Kong. When I got it, Windows 95 was preinstalled. I mainly used it as an email/news/websurfing box and it was my main home machine for more than a year. When I got my big desktop (Mojo), bollskag was retired to doing nothing for a while, then later got called into action as an IP Masquerade gateway machine, putting my home network on the internet and also firewalling off the windows machines.
Hardware
Bollskag is an Olivetti Echos Pro133D Laptop with 16Mb of RAM, 2Gb of IDE Disk. It has an 800x600x256 colour LCD display.
The original P133 processor has been replace with a P233MMX and the final product works at about 166Mhz. It might be possible to get this clocked up to 200MHz. Also, it needs more RAM, something I'm going to investigate. Old laptops can be difficult to upgrade.
Update: Monday, 29 October, 2001 - I made the mistake of turning bollskag off. It proved impossible to get it going again. This machine was really in a bad way - the plastic case is falling apart, the power supply seems to not work, the keyboard fell apart long ago and the display is dark and difficult to read.
bollskag has now been retired pending resuscitation and it's duties have been taken up by gizmo, which I'm currently putting together.
Software
When first acquired, bollskag was a Win95 machine, gradually upgraded to a Win98SE machine until the first disk failed around about late 1998.
At some point in 1999 I tried to install Linux on it, starting with Caldera Openlinux 1.3. This wasn't very successful and I had lots of problems with X. Then I found a copy of RedHat 5.2 and put that on with a similar lack of success. Eventually, I got it working, but didn't use it for very much. After that, it was an Open BSD 2.6 machine for a while before becoming a RedHat 6.2 box which it has been now for about a year. I did make it a FreeBSD box for about a day before going back to a very lean RH6.2 install.
It's incredibly stable and I can't remember the last time I had to reboot. Probably after I re-installed RedHat a few months ago.
It's primary function is as a gateway and firewall. It's the only PC connected to the modem and runs pppd as a demand-driven daemon. It also runs apache to serve some webpages, mainly statistics on what it's doing at the moment. Some old Stats pages - ppp dialup log, httpd access log.
Bollskag runs with a very bare install of Linux, with no X, Gnome or KDE.