Everything Else

ivelegacy wrote:

Krokodil wrote: I don't take in big iron systems only desktop sized ones

here I have only these machines

• Cerberus , which serves the whole local infranet, exporting NFS (Irix and linux filesharing), SMB/CIFS (Windows filesharing), SSHFS (RS/P, over FUSE), HTTP (personal wikipedia, personal blog), and RAID mirroring on a pool of 3 pairs of hard drives. It's located in the living room, it does makes no noise, it has a 7" LCD with touch screen on the front, and it's easy to control, so my girl friend is happy with its wikipedia and blog full of fashion things (OMG, I have reserved a pair of hard drive, a.k.a the whole pool0, to her needs)
• Octane2 , aka the big iron in blue hulk skin, currently does not wear any plastic and it lives hidden in the attic, attached to a control box with a lot of thin cables and wire going in and out its front-plane. I was said that it looks like a troll in its cyberpunk cave out from a Gibson's story (o'really ? )
• RiscPC/600 1 Slice, it lives in my little office standing vertically, looking for a second slice in order to hide an MC68332 inside, plus its equipment. I have hidden an embedded linux board inside with the purpose of providing a better file sharing (may be VNC) to RiscOS, which runs a true DOS box over gemini_II chip (486DX4@100Mhz). It's a very nice, quite, fast, and funny machine, especially if you install a DDE kit
• RS/P plus its external harddrive, it is so tiny and smaller than hulk by several order of magnitudes, that it can live in the living room, hidden under the hifi box, like a dwarf in its cave. It's MIPS32-R2, it shares a part (compiled as MIPS1) of its rootfs with Octane2 (MIPS4), oh well, but it worked only with kernel 2.6.17, cause kernel 4.1.* does not work with binaries compiled for PAGESIZE=4Kbyte, it wants PAGESIZE=64Kbyte. I am distilling a new stage, which does work
• XP217 Xterm , located in my little office, near RiscPC, no bigger than a toaster, it's tftp-bootstrapped by Cerberus, employed as console of everything, including Irix

my girl friend said
- chaos is not allowed, things must be in order!
- things here (especially things in the living room) must have a purpose

corollary: if she doesn't see, then it's ok
consequence: things must be hidden, like Transformers or dwarfs in their cave

so, can I use Lord Crimson as "wine refrigerator" ?

In my case I have:

O2 - Sits on the floor, 2 way NFS with other machines in the network. It's protected by other objects so it doesn't get smashed up. So far I've managed to keep it mint other than the very slight crack in the back corner near the exhaust vent. It has a new SCSI HDD in it that has much more capacity and is far quieter than the old one. Also machine acts as CD drive for the Octane.

Octane - Sits on left side of desk above the O2. My preferred SGI machine. Watch movies on it, play the games, mess with the software and store files on it. Currently not in command because of bad ethernet interface on system board - makes transferring files to it horrendously slow when the link constantly drops out.

Alphaserver - Sits on small table to the right of the desk and ontop of the Sun Ultra 5. Runs VMS 8.4. Hard to find software for it, so it mostly functions as a fileserver. Can play music(sound card) and extremely primitive video files too(2D display card).

Ultra 5 - In long term layup because it needs a SCSI HDD, a SCSI controller and a SCSI cable. The IDE performance was pretty poor last time I ran it. Fortunately I didn't pay anything for this machine.

uunix wrote: Are you sure lady GaGa exists?

do you mean her threats ? yes, they are real, already proved
(and proved I cannot work around them, tricks usually fail)

@Krokodil
great set up, lucky you when you can stay on IP30's console, I envy you, mine needs to be hidden in the rock more than a troll-dwarf, cause if caught by the "my darling wicked witch" it will be put on the flea bay !

I don't really know why GaGa hates everything that looks like a blue-hulk, she was not showing so much anger against the Red-Fuel when a friend of mine parked his red-box on her living room, perhaps because she knew it was not permanent (it went out in a few days, I just needed to install him a full and fresh Irix 6.5.27), perhaps because the Fuel didn't make all the noise that Octane does, perhaps becuas Octane is blue while Fuel is Red, and she hates blue cause "I feel blue" means "I feel unhappy", who knows

jan-jaap wrote: Be warned that if you should choose to do this, I will come over, quarter you , and kill you. In that order

YoYo- double-J -man, You can't quarter me, absolutely

I am a super adept of the Force ( I really don't know if darkside or not, but it's irrelevant, it's just which t-shirt do I have to wear ? hippie or dark ?), so I can escape every prison better than Wizard Houdini , get or build a lightsaber better than MacGyver , and start a duel better than Obi Wan Kenobi vs Anakin in The Final Battle - Darth Vader VS. Obi-Wan (oh well, I am touching my ... especially for battle end end, D-man was not so lucky )

Oh, and I can also use wicked tricks from Mortal Kombat ( I have played so many time that I know all the fingers combination on the pad, every special and magical attacks and defense ), so it would look like Celebrity Deathmatch : I mean the best and darkest bloody disembowelment ever seen in the video games & movie industry

ivelegacy wrote: @Krokodil
great set up, lucky you when you can stay on IP30's console, I envy you, mine needs to be hidden in the rock more than a troll-dwarf, cause if caught by the "my darling wicked witch" it will be put on the flea bay !

I don't have a wife, nor do I see the need for one. Krokodil lives free or dies. The Octane is my favorite of the 4 vintage computers and is the most useful.

Krokodil wrote: I don't have a wife , nor do I see the need for one

Heart Attack Symptoms && Warning Signs of a Heart Attack In Men: never ever say W. !
I was sweating, feeling cold, then I realized she is not miss.W., just the girlfriend
oh man, don't kill me with the never to be said W.ord

smj wrote: Wait, there's a machine that miod *doesn't* have an example of?!?

Glad to see they included the remote control, MrBill.

Congrats though - nice score. It'd be easier to get the keyboard converter though link (I'm not affiliated).

EDIT: Also, what's that bit of DECish looking gear in the right foreground of your photo?

Thats not a remote, that's actually my cell phone. beats the iphone by far.

Good call on the dec gear. That is the corner of a microvax 3800 that I just recently got running. One of the power supply's was bad. I pulled out the failing supply and i managed to get to the boot monitor on the Vt100 on my desk. That's about as far as I got with it. I was going to try and netboot netbsd on it, it has 64 mb of memory, i think that will be enough, but I have no tape controller or hard drive.

I actually just bought the microvax 3800 a little before the Crimson. It was within shipping range, I had it shipped to my workplace, but then my focus shifted to getting the crimson paid off and picked up. I'm probably going to end up with both the crimson and the Microvax on a network side by side in the same room. Ive also got a couple racks of pdp 11 gear in the garage, but ive yet to get that going, it ran for about 5 minutes then i ran into power supply issues.

miod wrote:

smj wrote: Wait, there's a machine that miod *doesn't* have an example of?!?

I'm staying away of the large iron those days. I mean, I'd love to get my hands on a Crimson or a Challenge, but I don't have room for such a machine and this wouldn't be a reasonable decision.

It was not a reasonable decision for me either, there is about a foot of clearance to get into the room, and between that pile of dell servers and the mound of laserdisk players there is next to no space to move anymore BUT BUT BUT ive got a crimson. I may not have the space to stand back and look at it, but ive got one.

skywriter wrote:

kshuff wrote: As jan-jaap says, been there done that...

Times three!



Yu're gonna shoot your eye out with that thing!

Ogod do you still have all 3?!?
how did you manage to get 3 of these? they seemed pretty rare and hard to find to me.

Nope, gave them away. It was a billion years ago.

the real problem is: what do you run on them ?

ivelegacy wrote: the real problem is: what do you run on them ?

Duh. FSN of course

jan-jaap wrote:

ivelegacy wrote: the real problem is: what do you run on them ?

Duh. FSN of course

Fsn is pretty neat.That was the first thing i tried out once i got my octane going.

I'm not sure of the capability of this machine. As seen on the picture, ive got it connected to that large 50 inch plasma monitor. I see it has a audio jack, i was unaware the machine had audio capability. Would it be possible to watch video's with sound with this machine? Perhaps Ill keep it connected to that monitor full time and use it for displaying video streams from the security cameras.

Speaking of I bought a thing and now my moneys gone...

I bought Framemaker 5.5 that was supposedly for UNIX. But you get the actual disk and it's only for power mac. The packaging is misleading, showing support for UNIX (IRIX) all over the place. Thanks adobe. I think I'm done buying software on fleabay.

I went out into the world. Wiser. Lol.

ivelegacy wrote: the real problem is: what do you run on them ?

For Crimson - I would have said "how do you deal with the Y2K problem" - the only product that had one. As long as you don't expect to run a web browser, if you like programming, there's a lot to keep you busy with one.

MrBill wrote: I'm not sure of the capability of this machine. As seen on the picture, ive got it connected to that large 50 inch plasma monitor. I see it has a audio jack, i was unaware the machine had audio capability. Would it be possible to watch video's with sound with this machine? Perhaps Ill keep it connected to that monitor full time and use it for displaying video streams from the security cameras.

Have a look at viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2956&p=22247

Over there you'll find some info and experience from when i got my Crimson and people replying to it. The audio on the IO3B panel is connected to a Philips SAA1099 sound chip. You'll find the chip close to the letters "Sillicon Graphics" on the board.
There is almost no info about this, but it is in theory possible to get sound out of it. Forget stereo CD quality though.

For displaying video streams there were video option boards which let you parse analog video to the framebuffer, but these options are very rare. O2's and Indy can do that more comfortably and that without taking the electrical grid down.

In retrospect these machines were most famous for their graphics and if you want to occasionally use them nowadays, let them display irixGL and openGL eye-candy.

I've learned a lot of software tricks from my Indigo2, but hardware wise the Crimson remains the most interesting and challenging.

Short for time? Dinosaur's seconds away from breaking down the door..? An operating system you know..? but only by flavour..? What you need is FSN.. The WORLDS slowest way to navigate a file system.. lucky there was a directory named security!

Forget stereo CD quality though.

I kind of figured as much. I found no mention of audio hardware on-line before purchasing the machine, so i assumed it did not have the capability. So it will not be suitable for watching movies like some kind of a large makeshift media center machine. Would have been cool. Guess there is still a reason to leave my octane at the desk. It will still get a ton of use though. I'm really trying to track down the IRIX software and development libraries, i would like to start learning how to compile and build stuff.

There is a Y2k issue? A webserver is completely out the window?

skywriter wrote: if you like programming, there's a lot to keep you busy with one

I am already too busy with my woody box, but i'd like to have a time machine in order to go back and observe engineers in SGI while they were developing Lord Crimson. I am interested in knowing their best practices, something never told in my university, never written in books, probably lost for ever. How the Hell they debugged the hardware they were developing when PC, ASIC (can't say FPGA) and equipment were far away from the definition of "comfortable" we have today.

uunix wrote: Short for time? Dinosaur's seconds away from breaking down the door..? An operating system you know..? but only by flavour..? What you need is FSN.. The WORLDS slowest way to navigate a file system.. lucky there was a directory named security!

uunix wrote: Short for time? Dinosaur's seconds away from breaking down the door..? An operating system you know..? but only by flavour..? What you need is FSN.. The WORLDS slowest way to navigate a file system.. lucky there was a directory named security!

Not sure how hard it would be to build on irix, but there was some similar program called FSV i compiled on debian a few years back. that might be something interesting. Might be too big of a challenge for myself right off the bat though. Not a programmer and it looks to have a bunch of odd dependencies.

http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

oh well, don't ask to Lord Portage