Nekonomicon - What's new in 6.5.30

josehill
Moderator
Who joined June 6, 2005, 8:53 p.m.
and authored 2628 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 7:41 a.m...

foetz wrote:

sure but that's not what the typical sgi customer cares about and i'm happy about this.

Actually, that was a central point of my post...SGI has to focus on what its biggest markets want, and certain common technologies aren't at the top of that list, so SGI is doing exactly what it should be doing. :wink:

...but it's also clear that the absence of full support for such common standards as USB2 and Firewire is a visible reminder of SGI's loss of competitiveness in the general Unix computing market (as opposed to certain niche markets) compared to Solaris, Linux, or even HP-UX.

At least AIX is still pretty lousy with USB and Firewire, too... :lol:

squeen
Moderator
Who joined May 9, 2003, 5:10 a.m.
and authored 2926 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 8:09 a.m...

I just updated my Nekoware (after installing a bigger HDD), and with new software like blender, bionic, imagemagick and a working (thanks neko!) firefox, if feels just like the good old days when I feverishly download the lastest IRIX OS releases and freeware (and didn't have to do any of the heavy lifting myself :oops:

).
All-in-all, Not too shabby.

foetz
Who joined April 14, 2003, 3:34 a.m.
and authored 4458 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 9:54 a.m...

josehill wrote:

foetz wrote:

sure but that's not what the typical sgi customer cares about and i'm happy about this.

Actually, that was a central point of my post...SGI has to focus on what its biggest markets want, and certain common technologies aren't at the top of that list, so SGI is doing exactly what it should be doing. :wink:

...but it's also clear that the absence of full support for such common standards as USB2 and Firewire is a visible reminder of SGI's loss of competitiveness in the general Unix computing market (as opposed to certain niche markets) compared to Solaris, Linux, or even HP-UX.

At least AIX is still pretty lousy with USB and Firewire, too... :lol:

okay but where is usb2 a common standard in hpc?

_________________
r-a-c.de

josehill
Moderator
Who joined June 6, 2005, 8:53 p.m.
and authored 2628 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 11:55 a.m...

foetz wrote:

okay but where is usb2 a common standard in hpc?

I'm not arguing that USB is a requirement for hpc, just that it can be a real convenience . It is showing up more and more in the marketplace, and it adds some flexibility to an environment to be able to just plug in a USB device when necessary.

Certainly, if you are buying Opteron or Intel based HPC nodes, they will have very well supported USB ports on them, whether you are running Linux or Solaris, and it's kind of neat to think about booting from a thumb drive for quick troubleshooting. It also seems to be well supported on Sparc systems, but even if your device isn't supported, just go to the Sun website and get the Solaris USB Driver Development Kit and write your own device driver! While it's not trivial to implement, full USB support isn't exactly rocket science, either. (I'm joking a little there, but the easy access to such tools shouldn't be trivialized.

)

Interestingly enough, for some of my common hpc tasks, I receive large data sets from my collaborators on 500 GB USB drives -- it's much more convenient to just plug such a drive into an hpc node than to shuffle through 10 DVDs, or even to connect the drive to a workstation and then export to an hpc system via nfs. Sure, you can do those things without a lot of trouble, but why jump through hoops if you don't have to? When plug-and-play works, it's a great thing!

foetz
Who joined April 14, 2003, 3:34 a.m.
and authored 4458 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 4:35 p.m...

josehill wrote:

or even to connect the drive to a workstation and then export to an hpc system via nfs.

well i'd trust that method way more

anyway i never said it wouldn't be handy. just not prio 1.

_________________
r-a-c.de

josehill
Moderator
Who joined June 6, 2005, 8:53 p.m.
and authored 2628 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 5:07 p.m...

foetz wrote:

anyway i never said it wouldn't be handy. just not prio 1.

Agreed! As always, best wishes...

-J

zizban
Moderator
Who joined Dec. 21, 2003, 5:59 p.m.
and authored 1351 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 5:08 p.m...

Ever try just plugging in a usb flash drive into a solaris box? it doesn't just work. You do have to sacrifice some small furry animals to get it to work.

josehill
Moderator
Who joined June 6, 2005, 8:53 p.m.
and authored 2628 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 6:38 p.m...

zizban wrote:

Ever try just plugging in a usb flash drive into a solaris box? it doesn't just work. You do have to sacrifice some small furry animals to get it to work.

When you tried, was it on Solaris x86 or Sparc? Solaris 10?

unixmuseum
Who joined April 19, 2004, 3:25 p.m.
and authored 2783 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 8:11 p.m...

josehill wrote:

zizban wrote:

Ever try just plugging in a usb flash drive into a solaris box? it doesn't just work. You do have to sacrifice some small furry animals to get it to work.

When you tried, was it on Solaris x86 or Sparc? Solaris 10?

I've never had any problem using USB thumbdrives on Solaris 10 on Sparc architecture... It works remarkably well...

hamei
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.
and authored 7208 notes

Wrote the following at Aug. 14, 2006, 8:42 p.m...

unixmuseum wrote:

I've never had any problem using USB thumbdrives on Solaris 10 on Sparc architecture... It works remarkably well...

So well, in fact, that usb is one of the very first things I disable on company computers :shock:

zizban
Moderator
From Cheshire, MA
Who joined Dec. 21, 2003, 5:59 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 15, 2006, 5:21 a.m...

Maybe it's the fact that I am using a usb pci card on my Ultra 10 that I installed. I'll try again on my Blade 100 when it arrives before I bitch

foetz
Moderator
Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 15, 2006, 5:28 p.m...

josehill wrote:

foetz wrote: anyway i never said it wouldn't be handy. just not prio 1.

Agreed! As always, best wishes...
-J

r-a-c.de

TaoTeCheese
From Brandon, Wisconsin
Who joined July 5, 2005, 8:51 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 15, 2006, 10:08 p.m...

josehill wrote: For those who aren't interested in such things, it's probably best to start looking at new IRIX releases as consolidated patch sets, rather than as major releases .

Look at the bright side, they're not called "service packs"

"Oh yes! Yes! Yes! Re-quickstart my elf files! Yes!"

zahal
Who joined May 27, 2005, 11:43 a.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 16, 2006, 9:15 a.m...

hamei wrote:

josehill wrote: It would be nice to be able to buy a common USB2 card, slap it into any PCI SGI box (like an O2, or even an O2K, not just the more recent machines), and then connect one or two $250 500 GB USB2 drives and have them work without having to sacrifice a goat first, rather than pay the same amount for a 73 GB SCA drive.

I'm hoping that the newish cheap nas devices will fill that gap. There's a new kuro box coming out soon that sounds good. Real good.

I'm putting a lot of hope into this kurobox thingy for mundane tasks and saying a little prayer every night that someone somewhere will sell me an 800 mhz fuel processor for cheap. Overall, it's hard to beat Irix on MIPS.

http://www.freenas.org

Sitting in a room.....thinkin' shit up. :evil:

400MHz R12k - :320:

Dual 550MHz PIII - Apple G4 Cube dual 500MHz/GF6200 - Newton Messagepad 2100 - Apple PowerBook 2400c/G3@240 - DECstation5000/133 - Apple Workgroup Server 9150/120 G3@280 - Apple Macintosh IIfx - Apple Macintosh Color Classic (Mystic upgrade) - Sun Cobalt Cube 3 - Tadpole RDI UltraBook IIi - Digital HiNote Ultra II - HP 200LX

foetz
Moderator
Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 16, 2006, 7:44 p.m...

zahal wrote: http://www.freenas.org

ah, hehe, a "shoot yourself in the foot" project

let's see that's supposed to be a fileserver - and only that. so it has to store and deliver files hence the heart of the thing is the filesystem. but there we have

Filesystem: UFS, FAT32, EXT2/EXT3, NTFS

bummer! no serious filesystems there :twisted:

dismissed

r-a-c.de

Jarndyce911
From Silicon Valley
Who joined Jan. 15, 2004, 2 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 17, 2006, 2:57 p.m...

For those who have not seen it yet, 6.5.30 is now available
for download...

If anyone gets it installed in the next few days, please let
us all know if you have problems with it. I am downloading
mine now.

Charles

josehill
Moderator
From New England, USA
Who joined June 6, 2005, 9:53 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 17, 2006, 3:31 p.m...

...and don't forget to install "Patch 7110 : XVM Failover initialization problem", which SGI released simultaneously with 6.5.30...

Critical Patch for IRIX 6.5.30 XVM Failover

Patch 7110 released with IRIX 6.5.30 to resolve a condition that produces extraneous XVM failure messages at startup. The problem effects failover and setting up the correct paths to targets. There is no data integrity problem. However, this problem could affect performance after a boot. The failover file can be used to balance the load across HBAs, RAID controllers, etc. Because of the problem, it is likely that lots of paths will use the same HBA instead of being spread over all the HBAs. Read/write performance could be impacted, especially on systems with lots of paths to each target. Patch 7110 will be preinstalled on new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing facilities. Patch installation is also recommended for customer upgrades.

stuart
From Cambridge, UK
Who joined Aug. 23, 2004, 5:37 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 17, 2006, 5:54 p.m...

Oh, FFS - as a registered SGI Developer, I have access to 6.5.30.
Do I get patch 7110? ... no.

That'd obviously make far too much sense :evil:

Could someone please PM me an accessible download location?

87Porsche
From Olathe, KS USA
Who joined Jan. 28, 2004, 5:16 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 17, 2006, 10:08 p.m...

Either I'm on crack or my Octane is. But when I go to open the first folder, 'cd1', in Software Manager the 6.5.29 readme comes up. After opening the other two everything shows up as 6.5.29... "Same Version".

stuart
From Cambridge, UK
Who joined Aug. 23, 2004, 5:37 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 18, 2006, 1:26 a.m...

Errm... you're right!

All of the files in the archive are named "*6529m*"?!

And I've just spent all night downloading them :cry:

IRIX and Software

What's new in 6.5.30 - Page 2