PERSONAL COMPUTERS

XIBALBA

Now at last retired, this machine spent a decade as our communal server; its 500 MHz processor was for a long time the most powerful on the network, but its place was taken by Zipacna and Cabrakan.

The hostname followed logically from the Demon domain-name, rather than the reverse - see Ah Puk below.

ZIPACNA

2004 brought a new server to take the load off Xibalba.  New to us, anyway; we got it fourth-hand (oddly enough, the guy who originally put the stocktaking tags on it when it was first-hand was me).  It recently suffered a severe stroke.

Zipacna is a noisy monster - you might even call it a dinosaur, but for us it was quite a step up.

CABRAKAN

After a string of salvaged boxes that either proved unstable or so good they went to become people's desktop PCs, this (with its 700 MHz CPU) is just right to go in the kitchen.

Cabrakan fits in neatly as the younger and even more boastful brother of Zipacna.

HURAKAN

When I became a professional techie in 1999 I obviously had to finally stop hogging Xibalba and get a workstation of my own - after all, computers practically come free in cornflakes boxes these days.  It has never been bleeding-edge, but it's good enough for me, and it gradually collects upgrades from other people's junk-piles (most recently for instance a better CPU and a less ancient hard drive).

Hurakan replaced Kukulcan on the network; the reason the name struck me as appropriate is that besides being a big enough windbag to have become a household name, the god Hurakán was also something of a perfectionist when it came to world-design.

AHPUK

Although Ahpuk was officially junked in 2004, something that imagines it's the same machine (despite a minimal overlap in hardware) still occasionally appears on the network.

John's arbitrary decision to name this machine Ah Puk was where the whole Mayan theme started...

XAN

Early in 2002 I realised that my collection of salvaged SIMMs, half-GB drives etcetera was enough to build another expendable testbed machine.  The only bit I had to pay for was the power cable, and even that ended up trickling down to the kettle in the kitchen!

Xan got its name because it is the pathfinder of the network, it was fashioned from cast-off fragments, and while initially it had no more power than a gnat it turns out to be equally hard to kill.  Oh, and it drinks blood, too, at least when I'm not careful with my screwdriver.

XAMANEK

Another scrape at the bottom of the spare-parts barrel in 2003 gave me yet another PC that could take over the role of "least missed if you break it".  Currently however a significantly newer incarnation is our stand-in gateway server.

The god Xaman Ek was chosen for his "pathfinding" associations, and for the limited sacrifices the machine has required on my part.

WAY

A visiting electrician gave me this laptop to make up for all the downtime in mid-2003.  It's a Compac Contura with a 25 MHz CPU, four meg of RAM, and less space than a Zip disk!  But it was still perfectly capable of running Debian Stable, if not a current Linux kernel.  Since it's not on the network I just use it to run nethack and call it a games machine!

Why the name?  Actually the question "why?" is the main reason for the name, since that's how the name's pronounced.  Apart from being bafflingly pointless, Way is also a ghostly presence out of the distant past, not physically manifested on the network; but at least in its afterlife it got to run a decent OS.