The collected works of Dr. Dave - Page 2

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Origin 2000 Deskside + SI-Tram Graphics. how its going. at Feb. 24, 2007, 11:37 p.m...

Just got this working tonight - a few tips:

You can skip the part about pulling the SI card - much easier is to run an X-server on your subnet once you manually set your O2K IP properly from the console, and get a nice fully graphical UI to find your keyboard and mouse, and set the links (or upgrade Irix when you can't find your bootable high-revision CD)...

You can skip everything in setting up the PROM variables. A 'resetenv' works fine. The caveat here is the boot diagnostics still go out the serial port, but once Irix boots, you get your graphical login screen. This might also mean that if the Vpro driver in Irix will work on an O2k, having PROM support is probably not necessary. It also means that there's no video *until* you install Irix, but since you're doing the initial install from the console anyways, no problems. Note that you must have already symlinked the keyboard and mouse, and have made the changes to the Xservers file - hopefully from the nice Irix desktop on your remote Xserver - before the video will work properly with the keyboard and mouse, but note that this process worked flawlessly on a fresh install, with only the changed IP address , the mouse and keyboard symlinks , set your video resolution , and the fixed Xservers file - and no other system configuration changes .

Addendum, change the autoload PROM variable to 'Y' also.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of SGI Octane vs PC??? at March 13, 2007, 9:49 a.m...

Probably for interactivity, double the clockspeed and add 'Pentium III' and you're probably in the ballpark. Once you go dual CPU's, that jumps quite a bit.

Of course, the high-bandwidth also means it's good and snappy right up to and including 'full-load' on the system, which is really the best part.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Trading Card Games at March 30, 2007, 8:29 p.m...

What's that one where you trade money based on cards? Ah, yes, poker... :twisted:

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 14, 2004, 6:37 a.m.
and authored 1718 notes

Wrote on the subject of War on CPU, why do we need logic? at March 31, 2007, 3:51 a.m...

not to mention fun, giving you the opportunity to play with your SGI gear.

_________________
'I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.'

- Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ programming language

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of so much for security :-) at May 7, 2007, 10:16 a.m...

I believe I read this paper last year. The science (on the one I read) was good, however it required careful setup and analysis to carry out, in a very controlled environment. It exploits watching the cache usage to attempt to compute the key by inferring values from the pattern of usage found in the cache.

Hardly an effective hack due to constraints, yet it does actually work.

That is, assuming this is the same paper.

(I've worked off and on in the computer security field for quite some time, and thus this is why the article came to my attention previously).

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Origin 2000 Deskside + SI-Tram Graphics. how its going. at May 21, 2007, 9:56 p.m...

I had a stab at getting an Octane PVO working with an MXE set in an O2k tonight - no dice. Although the XIO 'connects' and the PVO shows up in a lot of places, one place it doesn't show up is in the kernel drivers. :mad:

I followed the trail down into /usr/cpu/sysgen and discovered that the Octane PVO drivers installed into IP30boot instead of IP27boot , and if I craftily copied the driver over from the IP30 directory to the IP27 directory, I get linker errors referring to the gioio and giobr modules when I try to relink the kernel. Copying gioio.o and giobr.o from another machine doesn't do a thing, and as soon as I remove evo.a from the IP27boot directory, the kernel links right up.

I also softlinked the direct node in the /hw tree to /dev/evo , and this causes videod to attempt to load the driver, but it craps out without doing so and only acknowledges it tried, likely due to the missing kernel driver. No, the videod doesn't run without a valid video device in the system.

Not looking really good - anyone have any comments or suggestions? I can't really imagine that an O2k and an Octane - although architecturally similar - are close enough to let you jambalaya together a working kernel setup.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Origin 2000 Deskside + SI-Tram Graphics. how its going. at May 22, 2007, 7:38 a.m...

kshuff wrote:

Dr. Dave wrote: Not looking really good - anyone have any comments or suggestions? I can't really imagine that an O2k and an Octane - although architecturally similar - are close enough to let you jambalaya together a working kernel setup.

I don't know, I have'nt futzed with it in a while. I ran across the same situation, I had to force an IP30 install of the driver, but I didn't try copying over the relevent stuff to the IP27 dir. Did you also install the dmedia and impactdm stuff? I just ran across this with an Octane and forgot to install those as well.

Yup (as far as I can tell). Still no dice without the kernel driver.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Origin 2000 Deskside + SI-Tram Graphics. how its going. at Feb. 13, 2008, 1:40 p.m...

My best guess is that there is some sort of firmware PROM on the IO6, and even though there may be chip level support, at the OS level the IO6 doesn't 'know' about the ports.

IO6-G here finally, though the CadDuo-in-a-shoehorn works fine too with appropriate config changes.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of I'm going fiber at Feb. 26, 2008, 9:51 p.m...

I should try to get my SAN set up - Keeper knows what loads of stuff I have, including now a pair of Brocade fabric switches... QLA2200's support IP-over-FC on the PC side, and I have some Prisa dual-port NetFX PCI cards for the SGI side.

In any regard, this is the zone of least resistance, that is this technology was what was popular, so much gear is prevalent.

On the Ethernet side, stuffing some D-Link DE530 gigabit cards (Marvell chipset) in some Dell Dimension 2400's (MySQL, back-end-processor, network-manager type setup) yielded a synthetic bandwidth test of about 41 MB/sec between hosts. This is in a 32-bit/133 MHz PCI environment, under Windows XP. Point of reference.

I have an Indigo FDDI board, single channel though, but has the optical transciever on it. Came out of my first R4k Indigo, which apparently came originally from NASA... never tested though, and I've been loading up the Indigo's with G130's so a bit redundant here. Guess that means it could be up for tradin'...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of GTK+ and SGI VPro graphics incompatible! at May 18, 2008, 12:39 a.m...

oooookay... this goes back a million years, relatively.

Anyone know if this is is still an issue? I've been having real issues, specifically with XMMS and the ' badmatch ' errors - since as noted Vpro supports a 30 bit (and I think higher for V8/V12) visual. The common thread seems to be Vpro graphics. I've sett the root window to 'truecolor' and verified with xdpyinfo that the default visual is 24 bits, and although in it's latest version it seems to affect both XMMS versions from freeware and from Nekoware . On an O2, it's no problem, nor on non VPro Octane. The fault is aggravated in this case by selecting 'doublesize' for the XMMS player - they break differently but the base error is similar.

Since since then there are tons more Vpro users, what's the verdict and is there a simple fix? Or have I missed something blazingly obvious (and not the first time unfortunately, LOL!)

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of AIX 1.3 at May 23, 2008, 8:09 p.m...

pipeline wrote:

dragon_cb_cz wrote: All of them have SCSI controllers and SuperVGA MCA cards, some of them have TokenRing cards, I even got one Ethernet card with them and four others are on their way (hopefully). What surprised me, they're not as noisy as I imagined them - in fact, they're more silent than my Model 65SX. I don't have much time to play with them right now (exam period at school), but I'll keep you informed how it goes. I really look forward to running AIX on these!

Sounds like you found the motherlode.

Look at your ethernet and TR cards very carefully. 100 mbit cards are fairly uncommon, and they can go for quite a lot of money on e-bay. (Conversely, 10 and 4/16 cards aren't worth a bent nickel.)

Really? How much?

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of SGI in the 80s at June 9, 2008, 5:03 p.m...

skywriter wrote:

dc_v01 wrote:

skywriter wrote:

kshuff wrote:

What about Data General?

a hodge podge of stuff only they remember.

Ah, well, unfortunately they got immortalized

... The Soul Of A New Machine got the Pulitzer Prize, so a few more will remember..

yeah too bad. from all the DG people we got, they're not so book-worthy.

at this mornings meeting all the old dg'er's did was gush about the DG-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General-One which was basically a marketing ploy to get DG on every exec's desk. so much for the soul of that machine.

Hey, I remember when they came out... screen kinda looked a bit like this, or about as readable as this

Basically the screen was stitched together from regular LCD controllers, and weren't particularly fast in changing pixel states if I remember correctly, which made scrolling rather fun.

I thought the Grid's were the seriously cool examples of laptops back in those days, however.

_________________
:O3000:

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of QLA2212 works on O2, gives you 2 1Gb FC-AL interfaces at June 12, 2008, 8:05 p.m...

So, I tried the AUA-3020 on a Fuel, no dice - but it apparently works on an O2. So of course that got me to thinking...

I had a QLA2212 here (which also does not work on a Fuel), the reason being that the AUA3020 and the QLA2212 (basically 2 QLA2200's-on-a-card) both use PCI bridge chips to map two devices into a single PCI slot, and apparently PCI bridge chips do not play well with XIO-based systems . So that got me to thinking some more...

So I put the QLA2212 (should be the same with a QLA2202, they're basically the same cards) into the PCI slot on this O2, and voila - 2 FC-AL interfaces! This also explains Ian's recent observation about one of the Adaptec 4-port SCSI cards working, I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's basically a version of the card which has two separate SCSI interfaces with a bridge chip (3 chips) as per his warning that it is " this version from the picture " that works.

Anyways, the dual-port Qlogic card shows up as two discrete interfaces, and should be able to pull some fairly good bandwidth - though I don't have a scratch-array handy to do some testing right at the moment, but will try to do the test in the next couple of weeks. Should be able to easily max out whatever bandwidth the PCI slot can provide in an O2, as 64-bit PCI-33 theoretically can push 266 MB/sec, though I don't think that you'd get nearly that much with an O2. It also doesn't require weird drivers, nor case hacking - basically stuff it in, Irix automatically "reconfigures the kernel" and on your next boot-up, you have two interfaces! Woot! :lol:

Here's the hinv after the card was installed and the system rebooted:

Code: Select all


LilDude 1% hinv -vvm


CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.1


FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 1.0


1 200 MHZ IP32 Processor


Main memory size: 256 Mbytes


Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0


Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes


Data cache size: 32 Kbytes


FLASH PROM version 4.18


Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880


Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1)


CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0


Integral SCSI controller 1: Version ADAPTEC 7880


Integral SCSI controller 3: Version Fibre Channel QL2200A, 33 MHz PCI


Integral SCSI controller 4: Version Fibre Channel QL2200A, 33 MHz PCI


On-board serial ports: tty1


On-board serial ports: tty2


On-board EPP/ECP parallel port


CRM graphics installed


Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1


Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0


PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 1


PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 2


PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1011, device 0x0026) PCI slot 3


PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1077, device 0x2200) PCI slot 4


PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1077, device 0x2200) PCI slot 5


Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.4


AV: AV1 Card version 1, Camera not connected.


Vice: TRE

Cheers!

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of QLA2212 works on O2, gives you 2 1Gb FC-AL interfaces at June 13, 2008, 8:20 a.m...

I got this card off of eBay a few weeks back to try to figure out the best way to stuff two fibre interfaces in one slot on the IP35 architecture, which of course failed because of the bridge issue, so I'm kinda happy that it wasn't a total waste of investment. The exact card was a "Qlogic SANBlade QLA2212F/66"

I ended up getting a couple of QLA2342's, which seem to work fine, and are fully supported. Glad that the IRIX Qlogic drivers aren't picky in the slightest...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of QLA2212 works on O2, gives you 2 1Gb FC-AL interfaces at June 13, 2008, 11:09 p.m...

So I hooked up an array of 10 Seagate 9GB 10k fibre channel drives in a Clariion rack and ran some tests:

Test 1 - QLA2212, two channels:

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LilDude 3# diskperf -D -W -n "Speedy (10x9GB 10k)" -c512m /speedy/testfile


#---------------------------------------------------------


# Disk Performance Test Results Generated By Diskperf V1.2


#


# Test name     : Speedy (10x9GB 10k)


# Test date     : Sat Jun 14 01:05:04 2008


# Test machine  : IRIX LilDude 6.5 10070056 IP32


# Test type     : XFS data subvolume


# Test path     : /speedy/testfile


# Request sizes : min=4096 max=4194304


# Parameters    : direct=1 time=10 scale=1.000 delay=0.000


# XFS file size : 536870912 bytes


#---------------------------------------------------------


# req_size  fwd_wt  fwd_rd  bwd_wt  bwd_rd  rnd_wt  rnd_rd


#  (bytes)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)


#---------------------------------------------------------


4096    4.44    5.19    0.70    0.67    1.93    0.71


8192    6.07    7.08    1.62    1.43    3.50    1.34


16384    9.10   11.43    3.63    2.98    5.82    2.36


32768   12.18   17.13    7.75    4.54    9.80    4.31


65536   15.74   23.70   15.28    7.11   13.82    6.56


131072   20.62   35.54   20.28   11.69   18.78   11.05


262144   24.16   43.79   23.90   19.07   23.60   18.23


524288   26.28   49.42   25.97   29.25   26.02   28.14


1048576   29.50   79.52   29.27   52.25   29.24   51.11


2097152   30.94   91.64   30.80   71.88   30.80   70.82


4194304   31.48   98.50   31.46   85.74   31.37   85.56

Test 2 - yank out one of the cables, yielding just 1 channel (with failover goodness) :

Code: Select all


LilDude 4# diskperf -D -W -n "Speedy (1 channel)" -c512m /speedy/testfile


#---------------------------------------------------------


# Disk Performance Test Results Generated By Diskperf V1.2


#


# Test name     : Speedy (1 channel)


# Test date     : Sat Jun 14 01:31:10 2008


# Test machine  : IRIX LilDude 6.5 10070056 IP32


# Test type     : XFS data subvolume


# Test path     : /speedy/testfile


# Request sizes : min=4096 max=4194304


# Parameters    : direct=1 time=10 scale=1.000 delay=0.000


# XFS file size : 536870912 bytes


#---------------------------------------------------------


# req_size  fwd_wt  fwd_rd  bwd_wt  bwd_rd  rnd_wt  rnd_rd


#  (bytes)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)


#---------------------------------------------------------


4096    4.61    5.37    0.73    0.70    1.98    0.75


8192    6.36    7.33    1.71    1.50    3.65    1.38


16384    9.50   12.01    4.13    3.18    6.09    2.47


32768   12.70   17.66    8.14    4.80    9.73    4.32


65536   15.72   23.72   15.23    7.28   13.70    6.61


131072   20.13   31.22   19.66   12.65   18.61   11.06


262144   23.27   37.16   22.97   19.55   22.81   18.41


524288   25.12   41.26   24.98   29.52   24.98   28.30


1048576   27.71   61.65   27.55   47.87   27.60   46.73


2097152   29.01   68.00   28.89   59.22   28.90   58.19


4194304   29.54   72.01   29.49   66.48   29.53   66.11

Test 3 - 10k Fujitsu system disk (for a baseline):

Code: Select all


LilDude 5# diskperf -D -W -n "System Disk (Fujitsu 10k)" -c512m /testfile


#---------------------------------------------------------


# Disk Performance Test Results Generated By Diskperf V1.2


#


# Test name     : System Disk (Fujitsu 10k)


# Test date     : Sat Jun 14 01:43:05 2008


# Test machine  : IRIX LilDude 6.5 10070056 IP32


# Test type     : XFS data subvolume


# Test path     : /testfile


# Request sizes : min=4096 max=4194304


# Parameters    : direct=1 time=10 scale=1.000 delay=0.000


# XFS file size : 536870912 bytes


#---------------------------------------------------------


# req_size  fwd_wt  fwd_rd  bwd_wt  bwd_rd  rnd_wt  rnd_rd


#  (bytes)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)


#---------------------------------------------------------


4096    8.28    7.89    2.94    0.69    1.68    0.78


8192    9.32    9.02    5.96    1.37    3.00    1.41


16384   13.53   10.06    9.60    2.86    5.24    2.76


32768   17.71   15.59   15.07    6.04    8.71    4.95


65536   21.88   20.52   20.22   13.27   13.45    8.20


131072   25.53   22.92   13.64   13.57   16.61   12.47


262144   27.70   24.52   21.18   19.47   23.26   16.94


524288   28.95   25.31   26.78   19.82   27.20   20.60


1048576   31.72   31.09   30.27   29.57   30.72   27.21


2097152   32.86   32.48   32.54   29.99   32.16   30.28


4194304   33.37   33.23   33.26   32.63   33.13   31.98

Haven't got a clue whats up with the write speeds (note: write caching is enabled - I checked) - could be many things including the fact that this O2 is only an R5k-200. But 100 MB/sec isn't anything to sneeze at, and it likely exceeds the combined bandwidth of the two native SCSI channels, at least for reads. Someone needs to try a high-bandwidth SCSI card in the PCI slot in one of these (*cough*Ian*cough*) , and perhaps run the test with an R5k-200 to see if some of these numbers are somehow processor-related, or related to the PCI implementation on an O2, or even a bandwidth issue through the PCI-PCI bridge chip.

In any regard, they're some numbers to crunch. This is the exact same array I could get ~170 MB/sec read-write on an Octane, so it's not the array.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of entry level server + storage at June 24, 2008, 10:59 a.m...

pentium wrote: Entry level for me was a Compaq Proliant 1600 with five 9.1Gb hard drives and two 500Mhz PIII processors.

Yeah, the same here... though it's a pair of 600's in a workgroup server.

The main fileserver is a pair of 1GHz P-III's... SMP + fileserver + 66-MHz 64-bit PCI + 2GB RAM = good thing.

Having said that, lots of last-gen server gear kicking around cheap these days. Should be able to find a dual-*insert something fast*-server rig quite easily.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Silencing a Netgear switch for use with SGIs... at June 27, 2008, 11:30 a.m...

You can use a voltage-dropping resistor or diode in-line to slow the fans down. Also, don't overlook something like the Zalman Fan-Mate, which is basically a variable resistor connected to an emitter-follower transistor which allows you to adjust your voltage to whatever your speed requirements are, they're quite cheap and seem pretty useful. Or just replace the fans with something slower/quieter, there should be lots of options from the PC fan manufacturers. You should be able to find lots of recommendations on the 'silent-PC' sites as to options, even in the small sizes. Someone will have done a test somewhere...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.
and authored 2311 notes

Wrote on the subject of Mipspro + Little Endian Output at July 17, 2008, 6:06 a.m...

Worked fine on both a Fuel R14k and an Octane dual R12k-400 here.

_________________
:O3000:

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of PMC RM7000C-600T CPUs on ebay at Aug. 6, 2008, 5:11 p.m...

edefault wrote: Actually, there is no such thing (and has never been) as a 600MHz R7000 O2...
But: anyone who can trade in a RM5271 CPU module will get one in return,
since in the mean time I became the "lucky" high bidder on that auction .

Definitely sign me up on that action, if it's a go... have the correct 300 MHz module with the blue wire...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of PMC RM7000C-600T CPUs on ebay at Aug. 7, 2008, 12:45 p.m...

I'd probably be game to try to fix one. The original module Chicago Joe did a while back was of the 'non patch-wire' style and it worked OK. PM me...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of PMC RM7000C-600T CPUs on ebay at Aug. 7, 2008, 7:41 p.m...

LOL, I think there were two lots of them... :twisted:

correction: selling the 500 MHz version in singles now

eBay: RM7000B-500T

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.
and authored 2311 notes

Wrote on the subject of PMC RM7000C-600T CPUs on ebay at Aug. 8, 2008, 2:50 p.m...

So far as I know, all O2 mainboards will work with all CPU modules - the only real distinction is making sure your PROM is flashed to something recent. If it isn't, stuff a 180 in, boot, flash, swap, and bob's yer' uncle.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of DIVO on Octane & Onyx2 at Aug. 22, 2008, 8:37 p.m...

Not sure, but I believe Vagabondo got it working using SDI output from a hacked DVD player, judging by the comment "It sure uses up a lot of disk space". You might try and PM him to see what he did or didn't get working.

If you do, let us know what is required, I have a DIVO/DVCPRO board here that I haven't had a chance to play with.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of DIVO on Octane & Onyx2 at Aug. 24, 2008, 10:38 a.m...

87Porsche wrote:

Well I got Orion to work. The trick is... Don't use 6.5.30. I installed 6.5.8 on the Octane, then upgraded to .12, installed the DIVO software and Orion works. Fairly good. It's still a little funky, but it doesn't kill the machine anymore. Maybe it would work even better by going to a mid 20's release.

However, I did stumble across the 'avcapture' command late last night and that works perfectly. I haven't tried it on the Onyx2 yet (.30) but it's great on the Octane. Is that the command you were using?

I'd try the magic 6.5.22 release... not sure if anything beyond that was just some minor things (timezone updates, etc.) and possibly some extra hardware firmware updates with regards to O2k, seems that much of the new updates seem to have been targeted at the IP35-class boxes.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of DIVO on Octane & Onyx2 at Aug. 25, 2008, 4:46 p.m...

Thought it started somewhere around 6.5.21, definitely in 6.5.22

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Dual Port Ethernet Hack? at Aug. 25, 2008, 5:19 p.m...

One solution is the Menet IO card, it has 4 10/100 ports and fits into an XIO, giving you a total of five interfaces including the native one.

From Techpubs

The downside is it's not gigabit, which sounds like what you're looking at. The trick, as you've noted then, is to figure out what SGI used, and hack the driver which should work fine. Note that the Octane is not PCI bridge-chip friendly...

So, a quick look first for the card:

SGI Dual Port Gigabit card

looks a heckuva lot like:

PXG2 Dual-Port Gigabit Copper PCI-X NIC

which leads to this:

Silcom PXG2 info

Then it's just a matter of finding either a PXG2 card, or something compatible. Looks like a BCM5704 chipset, there seems to be a lot of them on eBay, but they all appear to be a slightly different model, but for $70 or so the answer can be had...

Also note that any of the PCI options for Octane utilize a bridge chip that tops out at about 170MB/sec, so a fully-loaded dual-port gigabit card would probably saturate the PCI bridge, or come close. If it's in a card-cage with 3 slots this could be an issue, but should work OK in a single-slot shoehorn. You'd be limited to 64-bits/33 Mhz.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Dual Port Ethernet Hack? at Aug. 29, 2008, 9:05 a.m...

For fibre channel, around 170MB/sec - so this is likely in and around the top end for the bridge chip.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of SGI in the 80s at Sept. 18, 2008, 7:46 p.m...

Hey, I got one of them hiding in the barn at my parent's place... old Model 15. Worked the last time I ran it (admittedly a while back now). 100 mA current loop...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of SGI in the 80s at Sept. 19, 2008, 9:28 a.m...

LOL - ok, that's a score.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel prototype (BLUE!) at Dec. 8, 2008, 7:38 p.m...

Looks like the same colour blue as the Visual Workstations, the ones which are basically in the same case as the Fuel, but ATX-ified. The chassis skins look the same minus the SGI logo.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel prototype (BLUE!) at Dec. 23, 2008, 6:19 p.m...

hamei wrote:

R-ten-K wrote: I may be having a brain fart here... I have seen the exact same case skins internally inside SGI, but it was a generic x86 ATX machine.

Probably the 230 - 330 ? The only part of a fuel case that's actually different from a peecee is the front plastic thingy.

plus the ATX back-panel, and the lack of a stiffening brace across the side, and the drives mount 90 degrees in the brackets. But it's obvious that much of the sheetmetal is shared, just by the holes punched in them and not used. Those ATX cases are quite nice, as far as ATX cases go.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel prototype (BLUE!) at Dec. 23, 2008, 11:41 p.m...

The SGI ATX chassis have a grey plastic front, with a blue 'swoop' for an air intake, but interestingly on the opposite side of a Fuel.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Need command format HD SGI Fuel at Feb. 17, 2009, 8:59 p.m...

My 2 cents...

The only time I've ever done a low-level format is if there are sector errors on the disk, that is the badblock list is non-zero in fx . This is really the only time that a low-level format should even be considered. Normally all you need to do to do an 'effective' wipe is to change the partitioning (I'll usually increase the swap partition size a bit) which yields 'blank' non-high-level-formatted partitions, which then forces a filesystem reformat if you're doing a normal miniroot inst . You can then proceed without having really to do anything else (or figure out which commands you need to set everything up) as the installer handles things automagically from that point.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of O2 - R10k 195 MHz, 128MB, 1600SW at Feb. 20, 2009, 8:45 p.m...

LOLcats: "Kompooter Kat is watchin ur micez"

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Fuel 600MHz, 2GB RAM, V12, 2x73GB HDD/Now with Sound at Feb. 28, 2009, 10:25 p.m...

Fuel uses DDR memory, so it has much better memory bandwidth than Octane. That's probably the biggest difference - being able to move stuff around faster.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Restore your yellowed plastics? at March 3, 2009, 7:40 a.m...

This is interesting...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Restore your yellowed plastics? at March 3, 2009, 10:28 a.m...

If I take the plunge, the first attempt would likely be discoloured keys on old granite Alps SGI keyboards, so the spacebar isn't two shades yellower than the rest of the keys...

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Restore your yellowed plastics? at March 3, 2009, 10:32 a.m...

jan-jaap wrote:

deBug wrote:

So who will be the first to take a greening Indy case and see if turns Blue ?

I was thinking of trying this on an Indigo external CDROM first. But I wonder what happens in the next 5 or 10 years with plastic that has been treated like this -- will it turn brittle? get yellow all over again?

It sounds like part of the problem is the UV stabilizer in the plastic. Assuming that the plastic isn't exposed to the sun, it should be OK - since the implication is that the additives in the plastic cause the colour change regardless of UV exposure. But having said that, I'm sure I have an Indy cover somewhere that's not too important, with green on the lid except where the monitor sat - which would be a perfect test.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Old Salt
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 11:37 p.m.
and authored 2265 notes

Wrote on the subject of Restore your yellowed plastics? at March 3, 2009, 10:36 a.m...

dc_v01 wrote:

Nice find! There's another thread here with a link to similar/same material, I think it went into more detail of the process (or maybe one of links off of that page has it.) I think pentium may have posted it...

I did a quick look and didn't see that, so I defer to the original thread. That's what happens when you go offline for a few months, busy with work and such.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.
and authored 2311 notes

Wrote on the subject of O2 250MHz R10K Modded/Overclocked to a 350MHz R12K at March 23, 2009, 9:03 a.m...

mapesdhs wrote:

I didn't do any soldering. I mean I just did the first stage only, ie. swapping the CPU core, which should result
(am I right?) in an R12K/225, but it didn't work, just gave a red light. Tried a second core from an Octane/300
CPU, same result.

Putting the R10K core back in, still a red light. Worked ok before the swap attempt. Something gone fubar...

I can't think of any other details that would be relevant.

Ian.

Ahh, the red light. Unless the PM is baffed itself, check the compression pins in the connector socket. It's not so much that the pins work loose or misalign, but its fairly easy to gunk up one of the contact surfaces, or have a miscellaneous bit fall into the socket and cause contact problems. The R12k-300 should have worked fine, as should the original R10k-225, they have the same voltage requirements.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day