mackerel: n.

  1. a spiny-finned food fish, Scomber scombrus, occurring in northern coastal regions of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean: family Scombridae. It has a deeply forked tail and a greenish-blue body marked with wavy dark bands on the back.
  2. any of various other fishes of the family Scombridae, such as Scomber colias (Spanish mackerel) and S. japonicus (Pacific mackerel).
[C13: from Anglo-French, from Old French maquerel, of unknown origin]

mackerel:


Other pictures: [back]

How and when machine obtained:

  • Mackerel was obtained from Chemistry in 1985 (?), by lugging the drives and the rack accross Riley Oval to the old UCC clubroom.

History prior to arrival at UCC:

  • General purpose UNIX box at Chemistry.

UCC history of machine:

  • Used to operate as the UCC's not particularly trustworthy terminal server, and NFS server with its big old SMD disks.

Current machine tasks:

  • Machine is currently down due to death. Early 1996, the Xylogics 7053 ESMD controller died, leaving us without access to the SMD disks, rendering Mackerel fairly dead. From Mackerel's cage, sprung Merman, a 4/280 which is currently our NFS server, but will be replaced with Mola, our SS1+ soon, allowing Merman to become a user machine.

Current software configuration:

  • Currently not running SunOS 4.0.3

Current hardware configuration:

  • Initially, Mackerel was a 32MB Sun 3/280 with a Sun-2 SCSI controller, Archive QIC tape drive, an ALM multiport async serial card, the FPA floating point accelerator, a Xylogics 7053 ESMD board, with some NEC ESMD drives an Fujitsu Eagles.
  • Currently Mackerel's cage has the SCSI controller, a 32MB memory board, as most of the above 8MB ones have died, the FPA becaue removing it breaks things, and the ALM, which is not doing much.

Future plans for machine:

  • Some of Mackerel becomes the server for the diskless machines, some stays in the current cage for a user machine, and some may be used elsewhere, thus forming at least two working machines out of the corpses of 2 1/2 deadish ones.

Special notes:

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Thanks:

  • The old guard members who initially dragged Mackerel to the UCC, got it working, made it useful and mourned its death. Lest we forget.

Related sites:

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