What is Frankenstein?

Frankenstein is our current replacement for the Asylum. Since The Asylum currently is being used for top secret research and development for a major Fortune-75 company (I'd tell you about it, but I'd have to shoot you), we're using another machine, literally built from the bodies of dead machines, to run our network.

So, heir doctor, what have you built here?

Well, I searched through our local graveyard, (computer parts graveyard, actually... it's the room next to our "computer lab" in the basement), and came up with the following motley crue of parts:
• AT&T 6300 case. This is a very special case--it has almost entirely non-standard mounting points internally. Joy.
• An old XT power supply, which I bought at a computer junk sale for $1.50.
• Asylum's old 486DX-33 motherboard.
• 8MB of 100ns RAM, which I pulled from the Sun 386i.
• Asylum's old 560MB IDE HD.
• An ancient PC-XT era Hercules-Mono card.
• A Zenith PC-XT Mono monitor.
• The new keyboard that I bought for the Asylum, but didn't like.
• A generic serial card.
• A SMC Elite-Ultra ethernet card. (Hey! That should be in the Asylum! Why does the Asylum get the crappy NE2K card?!?!)
• A hunk of cardboard.
• A stack of defunct (unreadable) Windows disks.
• An old Kraco car stereo speaker.
The machine construction is pretty unconventional. (That's putting it mildly.) Because the AT&T case has no standard mounting points for the motherboard, the motherboard is laying on a piece of cardboard, with the mounting support provided by the cards plugged in and screwed into the backplane.

With the motherboard in the case, there's no room for the original non-standard AT&T power supply, or for the XT-standard power supply, for that matter. So, I ripped out the worthless AT&T power supply, and I discovered a rather demented way of installing the XT power supply.

I mounted the power supply sideways, so that the On/Off switch sticks out the back, and the power cord comes in the back and connects inside. Without some sort of spacer, though, the power cord would rest directly on Frankenstein's RAM chips, so I made two stacks of three floppies, from a bunch of defunct Windows 3.1 floppies I had around.

So, now with a power supply, motherboard, and some cards in there, there's no room left for any floppy drives. Oh well. I didn't have any anyway. But I did have a hard drive, which I have laying upside down in the little remaining space in front of the power supply.

There's only one other major component *inside* Frankenstein... its speaker. I needed a speaker for Frankenstein, so I searched the graveyard high and low. After some searching, I found the perfect speaker for my beast--an old Kraco car stereo speaker. This was a fairly large speaker (a 4x6 speaker, I believe), with a sizeable magnet. The magnet was its best asset--I was able to stick the speaker to the top of Franky's interior, thus cramming the speaker in with everything else.

So what does Frankenstein *do*?

Frankenstein runs Linux 2.0.18 (as of 9/6/96), and performs several network serving functions. It's an NFS server, SMB server, WWW server, HTTP Proxy/Caching server, network router (IP masquerading), PPP server, terminal, network traffic analyzer/accounter, and all around neat machine. In fact, this page was served from Frankenstein.