Fishy was so named at the request of its donor; there's probably a story behind the name, but this is not the place for it.

Fishy is an NCR 3300, with a 486DX2/66 and ludicrously large amounts of memory (well, 96 MB — ludicrous by Linux standards when we acquired it!). The fact that Fishy uses IBM's MicroChannel Architecture, which wasn't supported by the stock 2.0 Linux kernel, meant that a bit of work was required to get up and running. The linux-mca project was a very useful resource in this regard.

Eventually, running a somewhat hacked version of Linux 2.0.30, Fishy ran as our main user box for over two years.

However, when Sticky entered the network, services were slowly migrated from Fishy to Sticky and when Fishy was no longing running anything important, it was taken out of service. A second network card was introduced, and RedHat 5.9 (a beta release of Redhat 6.0) was installed, which was based on a 2.2 series kernel and so included MCA support. However, some late night hacking was needed to persuade the kernel to support two 3c523 network cards at once. A little later it got upgraded to Redhat 6.0 proper.

Now firing on all cylinders again, Fishy has replaced Daffy as our gateway and mail server. Well, in fact, after some hardware problems, it is no longer our mail server.