IBM

I thought you hated your IBM 9114-275 and that it was the reason why you sold it? Anyway, you have one again and you seem to love it; funny how things can sometimes go! Aside from the CPU and RAM, what are the specifications of that system of yours currently? (Did you manage to install more HDDs? I heard that POWER systems can sometimes be picky about disks). By the way, how is audio under AIX? I heard some bad stories, with regard to distorted sound (with the standard IBM-branded audio adapter). Can you deny or confirm that?

Also, what about your public shell idea? Or are you going to be using it as your ‘main workstation’ now? Either way, best of luck and good work on the porting.

I had two in the first place. Now that I'm all over the RISC craze (and even if I wasn't, the PowerMac G5 does well enough and puts out even more heat than the POWER4+), I decided to give it one more chance, objectively, as a server. It's not that I fell in love with it again, it's just that I'm not trying to force it to be a workstation/desktop this time
The shell serving has to wait until I register the MAC address with somebody at the university. And as for the audio, you must have heard all those bad remarks from me. Don't believe me? The card's just 20 bucks on ebay.

Okay, I'll wait and see with regard to the shell server. I think you're right, I recall you complained about it, but I think I've heard others complain also (possibly on usenet).

yeah i need to buy that sound card for my 9111-285... currently it doesn't have one inside. btw it would be nice to see more software ported to AIX.

Just about any admin can be done through smit (Motif) or smitty (curses) and has corresponding commands that are displayed while running so you can learn the stuff you need to do pretty quickly. The WebSM java stuff looks a little bit less intimidating but it isn't at all necessary to use. If you have a Power3 or up, I don't think it would be particularly slow though. It doesn't need to be purposefully avoided, but smitty in a local term or ssh session is hard to beat.

AIX was designed to do all administration via smit also if you want to change someones user home dir there are special commands like chuser home=/root root

Word has passed through Wikipedia that it might be possible to install Windows NT for PowerPC on an ANS *IF* it has a particular ROM SIMM installed. How on earth would I go around to confirm this? sure, it would be so slow that it might probably not be worth it but it's a screenshot worth waiting for I think.

Windows NT for PowerPC is not very useful as there is virtually no applications for it.

There is not much to do with it, other than to play a couple games of patience. It is also impossible to use it for web browsing, as the version of Internet (s)Explorer is so ancient it renders all pages wrong. Personally I would not bother installing it.

Well, you could use it as a CIFS server and if the NT software is of the Server version you could even use it as an Apple Share server.
If you do you can share folders for Windows and Apple computers and they can then share files event though they don't speak the same protocol.
The Windows NT will appear to be both an Apple and a Windows server on the network. Pretty useful.
You can even add Unix services for Windows and make a NFS server of it.
The neat thing is that you can take any HP network printer and share it both as a Windows and an Apple printer.
For the SGI and Apple clients it will show up on the network as an Apple postscript laser, no need to but expensive postscript printers, NT Server will do the conversion for you.

Of course you can do all of this with an old Pentium and Windows NT server 3.51 or newer, you don't need a special IBM/apple server for it but if one was looking to do something useful with the Apple server then loading Windows NT server for PPC might not be such a bad idea, providing it comes with the Apple share and Unix services for Windows add ons.

AFAIK MS Services for UNIX was never released for PPC. It also doesn't run on NT 3.5 or 4.0. Back when it was Interix maybe, but the MS version requires XP or newer.

You have an unusual piece of hardware there. Why you'd want to turn it into a rusty peecee running an outdated version of Windows is well beyond me.

In the same way that I usually recommend avoiding OSs other than IRIX on SGI MIPS kit (though I don't begrudge people who want to experiment with them), I suggest sticking with AIX on the ANS. Especially when trying to raise an old system from the dead, I prefer to do so using the OS that the machine was designed for first.

As for MS Services for UNIX, some quibbles, I know, but here we go:

• SFU 1.0 required NT 4.0 SP3 on x86/Alpha
• SFU 2.0 required NT 4.0 SP4+ or Windows 2000 on x86
• SFU 3.0 required NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 2000, or Windows XP Professional on x86
• SFU 3.5 required Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003 on x86

Emphasizing: any version of Windows 2k worked with SFU 2+, but only the Professional version of XP was supported on SFU 3/3.5.

First off, I would like to be very thankful to a man who I will only name "M" for making this moment possible.

Anyways, many hours and several phone calls later I am now in possession of one...


two....


THREE!


That's right, I now own all three systems and I'm very thankful that M was nice enough to do this.
Anyways, I powered one up immediately, I have yet to do another one and the nasty one I spent the afternoon stripping down and cleaning the entire system. It's a lot nicer now but to be on the safe side I won't try powering it on until the box dries out.
That floppy disk was also the RAID card configuration disk. I'm greatful that was not lost.

That was not all. Remember how when the Macintosh was released, they had the signatures of the team stamped inside of the case? Well when I took the front off, it appears the same applies here for the ANS team.


This is looking to become an awesome summer!

Cool, and congrats to your new data center
Don't forget to visit the beach/lake or whatever you do for summer fun, or you risk getting deeper in to geekdom
Last two summers I have found myself doing more of amateur radio or computer projects on my summer vacation and less of hanging out on the beach/clubs/friends barbecue/air shows etc.

Don't know how much sun and warm weather you have in your location, in Sweden the season is so short it more or less a mortal sin to not be outdoors enjoying it while it lasts.

Looking forward to see the progress, and thanks for sharing your adventures.

great expressions :)