Cluster Names

Early History:

Back in 1996 or so, when I first became seriously involved in linux, I decided it was long past time to name my machine - which was, at the time, a 486/25 with 16MB of RAM, and a 1.6GB hard disk with two FAT partitions and one ext2 partition. Windows had recently trashed my two FAT filesystems, leaving behind a swath of chaos. Hence the name of the machine: chaos sqvared.

Chaos sqvared, or chaos2, was my trusty 486 until the end of 1996, when I finally upgraded to a Pentium/166 machine. The next machine kept the same name for awhile because most of its parts came from the old 486 (except processor/MB and RAM), but over time, it held the names sillyputty and krelian. The first name came about late one night, while we were manufacturing sillyputty in Upper Alley 7, which produced a rather large mess in the kitchen for so little putty (we used a bit much flour, I think).

Birth of krelian and velius:

That name was relatively short-lived, however, and I finally settled on a naming convention for my machines - all one of them - I decided to name them after antagonists in Square Co. games. The machine currently responds to krelian, one of the antagonist characters from Xenogears (a brilliant game, by the way).

Of course, when I setup my new machine, the K6-III/450 that runs anywhere from 412MHz to 460MHz (depending on its mood; I think my motherboard is quirky), the naming convention became a tradition. The new machine is named velius, and currently handles most of the web-related servers for the cluster (web, ftp, name service). Velius is, of course, a character from Final Fantasy Tactics, well known for his quote: ``I am velius.... the devil... your wish is granted''.

ultros is currently a virtual server, but has a reasonable chance of becoming the name of the next machine - ultros being the irritating octopus in Final Fantasy VI (FF3-US) that you can never quite kill: ``Look! I'm a receptionist!''.

Expansion of naming scheme:

The next system assembled was quistis. The name breaks with the ``antagonist'' tradition and expands to characters from Square games in general. Quistis is perhaps the most stable character in the Final Fantasy VIII party.

After that came ozma, the laptop which is named after the ``big round guy'' in Final Fantasy IX (the one that's nearly impossible to defeat). Ozma isn't running a webserver (nor is it even on a static IP address), so it is not linked here.

A more recent acquisition is shion, the laptop which is named after UZUKI Shion of Xenosaga. Shion isn't running a webserver (nor is it even on a static IP address), so it is not linked here. Shion was acquired around May 2003; around the same time, this website was moved from my servers to dakar.lunixsys.com, a Lunix Systems server.

Now we have a printer whose name is nanami, taken from Gensou Suikoden II. The printer uses an internal address and is not reachable from the outside world (of course, we'd rather not have the world at large printing to it!).

The latest laptop is luc, taken from Gensou Suikoden I, II, III. This laptop is slowly replacing shion for daily use, though shion will remain as long as it functions for compute services. This name is indicative of the current xdm login screen for all chaos2 cluster machines. luc is also host to sasarai, a Windows XP Professional installation running within a VMWare virtual environment.

I currently hold the domains chaos2.org., velius.net., and pacolyn.org.. If you're interested in the registration details, check the whois database. chaos2.org is used for general cluster machines and my main website. velius.net was registered in an effort to find a better registrar than NSI -- currently, it is used for special projects. pacolyn.org is the current home of the Pacolyn tree (formerly the collection of Targeted trees that were merged in May 2002), a media/work tree that spans 17GB (as of June 2002).

The name Lunatic Pandora has been applied to the cluster of late... this is in homage to a fascinating and twisted place that came out of some developer's mind at Square, which appears in Final Fantasy VIII. Hey, I like the theme for Lunatic Pandora, so what can I say?

If you are familiar with UNIX systems, then you are familiar with the concept of named mount points for disc partitions. The following names have been used as mount points in recent history:

• On krelian.chaos2.org.:
  • infinity: Audio files
  • dos: Old DOS installation
• On velius.chaos2.org.:
  • insane: Application tree
  • sephiroth: User data
  • surreal: Appsrc, archives, tools
  • rei: System backups, logs
  • misato: logs, disc images, packages
  • yuriko: Audio files, burn tree
  • azalyn: Home of internal Pacolyn tree
• On velius.chaos2.org. (the Tsukihime drive):
  • satsuki
  • hisui
  • kohaku
  • arcueid
• On quistis.chaos2.org.:
  • chii: User data, fridge, void
  • mireille: Disc images
  • menchi: Reserved for future use
  • ultimecia: Reserved for future use
  • lunaticpandora: System backups
• On shion.chaos2.org.:
  • pacifica
  • racquel
• On luc.chaos2.org.:
  • andarc
  • seneca