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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn’t do it justice, so I decided to search for it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux. Basically it’s just a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative that’s consistent across computers to make maintenance useful. It also has a cute set of version names based on atomic number.

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> It also has a cute set of version names based on atomic number.

This reminds me of my favorite lab numbering scheme. Each computer in the lab is assigned an element name, with the last byte of its assigned IPv4 address being its atomic number.

So if your machine were `cobalt` your IP would be 192.168.0.27, If it were `oxygen`, 192.168.0.16, etc.

“Glenn, we need you to find another transuranic element again…someone added a new machine to the network”

You could add another class 'C' and start naming the networks by the elements and the hosts by the chemical compound resulting!

yeah just grow them organically

It's a bit late for Seaborg, but there are IUPAC systematic names for undiscovered ones anyhow.

Thats pretty cool.

Yeah. Scientific Linux was never particularly interesting as linux technology. It was held up as a success story for deploying a domain-customized Linux distribution at very large scales. And by all accounts (I never used it) it was very successful. But upstream has gotten better and app deployment in the modern world (c.f. Docker et. al.) has made strides in decoupling itself from OS weirdness. So they probably just don't see the need anymore.

I used it a few years ago when we realised Centos 6 had dropped support for some packages (can't remember which). They had stepped up and backported these, plus some other fixes.

I can see in the days of containers etc they wouldn't be needed, but they definitely filled a need back in the day and I thank them for it.

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