SGI: hinv

ivelegacy wrote: i am afraid i have not understood which netlan you are talking about, never seen other options except the Phobos

Best bet is the page about it on Ian Mapleson's site - http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/fastether.html

In a nutshell, the Phobos GIO64 cards deliver much closer to 100Mb ethernet, but are pricey. Or the EISA cards are a lot cheaper, but restricted due to the bus. The card in my machine is one of the 3Com EISA ones with the hacked Phobos driver to make it work. It's physically pretty much identical to the official Phobos EISA cards, but the driver is tweaked to stop it rejecting my card due to it not being the Phobos version (I didn't do the driver hack...)

It's not a speed freak, but it's definitely a chunk faster than 10Mb.

uunix wrote: My first guess would be a dns issue.

I agree. In my experience, DNS timeouts are the cause of this at least 90% of the time. Next most likely: hard drive starting to fail.

if the harddrive was faulty then i would have issues using the machine remotely (1) too, while i have not: issues are ONLY if the machine is used locally

the hard drive is a brand new unit, the scsi cable and the external box have been heavily tested with linux: not issues about that


(1) exporting x11-display through ssh is working perfectly without any performance lost, when i launch Wordpefect remotely i get it in less than 1 second, while using the machine locally has up to 10 second of delay when i click on everything i can click on the desktop, it's really too slow to launch things

Look at DNS, especially how the Indigo2's hostname is configured, then. The IRIX desktop is a little quirky in that it assumes almost all resources are shared in a networked environment, so it uses DNS even for accessing many local resources, where you wouldn't expect it to be used. (Search for posts or techpubs articles about Cadmin and objectserver if you're curious for details.) Among other things, check the /etc/resolv.conf file and /etc/nsswitch.conf files. Any time you see something like "nis dns files" you probably are better off dropping nis (unless you know you are using nis) and putting files before dns (files meaning /etc/hosts, primarily). There are a few threads about this on the forum.

disabling the networks (put it off) has fixed the issue. Now i have to understand exactly what is wrong.

thank you for your tips

I'm glad that the problem you were seeing seems to be due to the networking, which you can now correct.

But I couldn't help being confused by this:

ivelegacy wrote: I’m rather surprised about that: my O2+ with R12K @ 400Mhz is faster than my friend's impact R10K @ 195Mhz
the feeling you have sitting in front of the machine is that O2+ is faster than impact
and Mathematica for Irix completes things faster

Well, yes - your O2+ *is* faster than his Indigo². Short of serious graphics tasks where IMPACT might come into play, why do you think a machine with a CPU half as fast should perform better? Even with Mathematica, all the math is happening on the main CPU, not in the gfx system.

smj wrote: I'm glad that the problem you were seeing seems to be due to the networking, which you can now correct.

fixed, i removed "DNS", definitively, and forced "file"
now it takes less than 1 second to launch a local console

smj wrote: all the math is happening on the main CPU, not in the gfx system.

yes

R10K @195Mhz (indigo2) vs R12K@400Mhz (O2+)
200Mhz of difference about the CPU clock
and Mathematica do a lot of CPU calculations

my friend has a " SolidImpact gfx " in the his indigo2 , it should be the low cost gfx for Impact
he said me he had a " Maximum Impact gfx ", which was 3 boards mounted one near the other
and he sold out because he did not use

i should also try Maya-v5, sooner, or later

what Irix Application can make the heavy use of the gfx instead of the cpu ?

So dragging this back on topic..

Potted history - I acquired the system early in the year. After a month of two of tinkering, it decided it didn't want to power on any more and I guess I was the victim of a duff power supply. I was reluctant to simply buy another old unit, as there would be no guarantees on how long that might last before failing.

I found a company here in the UK who were confident they could resurrect the power supply but a large bill and several weeks later, the system was still not working. I returned the supply to the company who spent more time investigating but eventually threw in the towel and, to their credit, gave me a full refund no questions asked despite having invested significant time in trying to resurrect it. This whole process took a long time, as in between, I took the 'fixed' power supply over to a friends to test on his R10K Indigo2 - I needed to rule out whether there was something more sinister occurring with my system, beyond the power supply, but we confirmed it was just the supply at fault.

This bought us to the middle of the summer approximately. I was all set to just sell off the system minus power supply but folks on here suggested getting in touch with Ian Mapleson and see if he'd consider a trade for my HighIMPACT board set, for the far less desirable SolidIMPACT board and power supply. Thankfully he was amenable to the idea, and so the deal was done.. and here we are, about 8 months after the whole saga began, with a working system again - just in time for christmas. I didn't really want another second hand power supply, but was really keen to get the system back to life, so decided to go for it.

I've dealt with Ian ( mapesdhs ) several times over an approximately 15 year period, and I have to say it's always such a pleasure to deal with him - friendly replies to emails, and his near legendary packaging of the items he ships - he's a real asset to this community. Thanks, Ian!

So.. here's the updated hinv.

And a picture of course..

Brilliant.. at long last (I feel quite connected to this machine now).. I also agree regarding Ian, hopefully he's blushing like a tomato.

Ian is super

ivelegacy wrote: Ian is super

He sure is.

Fifthed or Sixthed, or whatever number we're now up to

Nice looking system!