The collected works of Alver - Page 4

I recently moved to a new house, and it has a second small "office" building on the terrain. It has two rather spatious rooms and a separate 3 x 40A power, so... the plan is to make it my office once I finish fixing the roof, wiring etc; one room with the desks and appliances etc, and one as "server/demo" room. Naturally, I'd need a few server racks in there (well, I wouldn't *need* it. I do *want* it though ).

Does anyone know of a reliable firm, preferrably in Europe (shipping costs!), who sells refurbished SGI server racks? For anything non-SGI I know http://www.serverhome.nl , and that's more or less what I'm looking for: a professional party, large stock, and all the accessories that you could need to go with it (PDUs, KVM, ...).

This is more or less what I'm looking for (quick 10-second google search):



Basically something that can house a bunch of standard rackmount servers and equipment without being the boring grey/black that is standard today and if it'd have an SGI label, that'd be a huge plus.

foetz wrote: if you wanna just use the sgi racks for the looks and put some commodity junk inside; that'd be almost as bad as octane case modding

Well, I wouldn't want to gut a proper SGI machine just for the rack 't was just the first pic I found. But I suppose they made "just" racks as well? Not all SGI servers were big enough to warrant a full rack for their own...

Also: not for hosting commodity junk, I have a cheapo server at Hetzner for those workloads but there's the ES47, some HP-UX machines, VMS, ... that'd be less of a disgrace to an SGI rack, wouldn't it?

Arghl! Those are *great*... but 450km away (which wouldn't be an issue, if there wouldn't be a spat of water inbetween)... bummer, that's exactly what I was aiming for indeed

smj wrote: That's right, that's absolutely right. Because in fact, hamei's never seen my house. He's seen my fake house, which has some furniture in it, because my real house is packed wall-to-wall with Twiggy-drive Lisas and Macs, Cray-1s, dozens of max config IRIS 3130s, Xerox Altos, original Connection Machines, the fabled prototype "Minnow" desktop PDP10 connected to a Symbolics Framethrower, unbuilt Altair 8800 and Heathkit H11 kits, NeXT prototypes based on the Motorola 88000, a complete set of every SGI desktop machine with clear plastic skins, a PDP-11 running OS/2 that I can't tell anybody on classiccmp about, and I have Gary Kildall and Steve Jobs - both deaths were faked - locked up in my basement.

And they're all in or on awesome purple SGI racks.

That's right chumps - y'all got nuthin' on me.

My sarcasm detector is really confused. Should I go ahead and cancel that 18 wheeler truck + pack of Albanian thieves heading for your place, or shouldn't I?

Kira wrote: You could always get a zx2000 or zx6000 - they're pretty fast (by Old RISC Crap standards) and have good OS support.

Be advised, zx6000's are pretty loud.

Wait, what? My zx6000 is a *lot* quiter than my x86 peecee home server. Granted, I don't push it very hard. If it weren't for the 3 SCSI disks, I doubt it'd be noticeable at all.

smj wrote: Remember, Alver was an HP minion once upon a time -- he could've actually gotten hold of the ZX6k deskside kit. I read (somewhere) that the deskside config was a lot quieter...

Ah, yes, naturally. If it isn't a zx6000 deskside, it's just an rx2600 with gfx added. Which is what a zx6000 really is, but like I said, the workstation version that I have is really, really quiet.

Pontus wrote: You forgot your dual processor PDP-6 and octa-core prototype BeBox

And the IBM zStation... definitely the zStation

All joking aside: if I were in the UK, I'd have chartered a truck by now, even if it meant putting the racks in storage until I finish the renovations... sigh

Is this the Altix ICE you mentioned in that other thread I started regarding SGI racks?

£10K is a tad more than I'm capable of convincing the wife of what kind of size are you talking about? 500+ cores of I2 isn't exactly something you can stuff in two racks, afaik.

It's been a good while since I've had to open up my C8000's, but do they have drive caddies at all? I vaguely remember just having to put four disks in the disk compartment, connecting the cables, and off you go. They're not SCA and not accessible from the outside so no hotplug.

ClassicHasClass wrote: While I'm dreaming, I'd like a Cromemco Dazzler, too. And a pony.

From experience: ponies are not worth it. All they do is eat and poop and poop and eat.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Alright got the C8000 to boot, but.. its not recognizing any HDDs I put in. I'm using an 80-pin to SCA adapter to connect a Fujitsu SCSI which I have confirmed works fine. I've already forced the SCSI ID to both 0 and 1, its not doing it. Do I need to terminate all of the leads on the SCSI ribbon or something?

Can't say I've had to do anything at all to get disks detected; if there's any terminators required, they were factory installed in my machines. Are you sure it's not the SCA adapter? Are non-SCA disks working?

Eh, the C8000 takes 68-pin, right? Mine do, at least... 68pin plus standard four-pin connector...

hamei wrote: Anyone want to do some trading ? I'm sick of this worthless fucking piece of shit. It's either get rid of it or throw it out the window (10th floor, bad idea for innoccent bystanders but big pleasure for me.)
Have available one complete O350 w/V12, dual 700's plus another one w/V12 that is almost complete but of course also doesn't work (bad interface board, L1 won't wake up).
I could throw in a fucking useless O2 also but it's not worth shipping.
I have a dual 400 V12 Octane2, would like a 2x600 and another V12 for it. If there's a 2xV12 carrier available, that would be cool.
O350's are garbage. I would suggest avoiding them. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to why SGI went broke ?

More to the point: where are these machines located? My wife is 75% likely to kill me if I check, but I want at least to know how much it'd cost to ship to my backwater.

I use debian on virtually everything. Mint is pretty decent too - it's debian based after all - but so far I've stuck with debian plus the cinnamon desktop (it's in the official repos).

I wouldn't go for Ubuntu because of its obvious unfitness out-of-the-box for slightly older hardware, but it all comes down to taste.

gocram wrote: The zx2000 is a fairly rare and wanted system, in its niche of course. It's definitely a very nice system, as a rather quiet and energy-efficient one (compared to other systems in its class), which would accommodate a large number of platforms and fairly recent and up-to-date ones, too, I might add. VMS guru Stephen Hoffman also proclaimed that he considers the zx2000 one of the nicest VMS (I64, needless to say) workstations you could lay your hands onto.

I disagree with Hoff there - for me, the zx6000 is the machine to get. It has double the CPU power, and is still very, very quiet. I've had mine for a few years now and it's one brilliant machine. Just make sure to get the actual desktop versions - it was created as rackmount too, and those are a bit less quiet.

gocram wrote: Something similar was promised for HP-UX once, but that seems uncertain now (read: rather unlikely)

The port existed internally, and was shitcanned because it would have cost in the range of $100M to get to production quality, and that kind of money on a line of OSes which, let's be honest, isn't doing all that great... no chance.

You're right that a zx2000 will be a safer choice - it's always silent. I'm still glad I went for the zx6000; it outputs a fair amount of heat (hey, it's a dual socket IA64 after all) but it's about as quiet as the average peecee if you don't put in screaming 15K rpm disks.

Colours, tastes.

Long shot here, but anyway...

- Is it *supposed* to work (as in, do you have any documentation which mentions it being supported)?
- Can you mount shares that are *not* on the host itself?

Reason for asking this is having similar symptoms with an older version of a completely different emulator (simh) on a completely different host OS. The guest OS could not talk to the host OS, but it could talk to anything else on the network. It's apparently a lowlevel niggle with how networking is implemented, and not necessarily related to a problem with the guest or software. Might be something similar on your side too - YMMV.

Oh, christ. That thread again.

The machines are 10 years old. Compare them to other machines of the same age, and there's a chance you're not talking bullshit. Claiming that a Fuel - any Fuel - can outperform even the shittiest low-budget Intel cpu for sale at the moment at whatever task, is reaaaaaaally stretching it a few lightyears beyond breaking point.

I love my SGIs. They are slow. I don't care.

Lose the psychedelic drugs, move on.

What exactly do you want to run on it? I (used to) have a large pkgsrc install on it - HP-UX 11.11 is a pretty easy-going target for that. Had a more-modern-than-CDE desktop (fluxbox, iirc xfce as well), gimp, some games, etcetera. Firefox is a total pain to build due to its use of ASM (and the fact that it requires a frankenstein gcc/aCC build chain to even work) so I stuck with the HP provided ancient 3.5.9. But yes, it is a really, really nice box.

rosehillbob wrote: I just got two EV47's missing the hard drives. I got new drives and tried to install tru64 5.1B Well didn't get to far attempting to boot from either a CDROM or RIS server it reads the boot loader OK but hangs with "jumping to bootstrap code". I gather from from searching the need you need "New Hardware Delivery Kit 7 (nhrd7)" or tru64 5.1B-6 kit 8 which contains nhrd7. Again searching the net the kit used to be a download from a Compaq then HP site but when HP cancelled support of tru64 the site was removed.

Hm, odd. My ES47 installed Tru without a problem - I'd have to check what version my install media are. Probably new enough to have that kit, I guess.

rosehillbob wrote: Before someone asks the option to use OpenVMS is available but you can't get Hobbyist license anymore.

I don't think this is still the case; there was some confusion during the transfer of VMS to VSI but it should be working again - check https://h41268.www4.hp.com/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548&design=cs .

paulfred wrote: I did some digging online and found out that apparently OpenVMS on I64 isn't able to accept USB input during boot at all. This means that a serial console seems to be the only input method until the X server has been initialized.

Hrm. That would imply I installed VMS on mine using the console, which sounds *very* unlikely (my serial console is my 8086, and it's been hooked up to another machine for ages). Where did you get that info?

I'm getting the itch to boot the thing again now to verify

Krokodil wrote: Unfortunately that's the dilemma with many of these machines is that finding software for them is very difficult or impossible.

It seems to be particularly problematic with Tru64, VMS, HP-UX, AIX.

IRIX/SGI is one of the best systems for a hobbyist to have.

... why? I don't see how it's any more or less problematic. All four are proprietary, all four require licenses, and all four require you to build stuff (or use stuff others have built).

Oh, heh. Yeah, this is (probably) one of the examples why I stopped using the rubbish from connect.org.uk. There's packages in there that would make your eyes bleed. Missing files, badly labeled stuff, wrong permissions, you name it. Not to say that everything on there is bad - that wouldn't be nice to many of the package maintainers - but there is zero quality control.

Just don't bother with it. Whatever they have on there, you can build it with pkgsrc yourself. Cleaner, more up to date, easier to maintain, safer. My old post on this is for a rather older version of pkgsrc and gcc, but it's still fairly relevant, I think. I probably have a tarball with my pkgsrc sources+binaries tree up somewhere still.