The collected works of JohnK

Check the power supply for leaking electrolytic capacitors. I had the same problem with an IPX that did the exact same thing.
First, make sure you unplug the power supply from the wall, etc.
Once you have taken the power supply out of the box and took off the cover, unscrew the PCB from the metal cage.
There are 3 3300uf capacitors that have probably leaked. They are the tallest caps you see. If you also see a coat of thick brownish color substance on the board where this caps are located which can be wiped up by a Q-tip, that's probably what has happened. All three of mine where in this condition. The other caps where ok but be sure to check all of them just in case.

I unsoldered those caps from the board, cleaned up the board really good with pure alcohol and Q-tips and installed new ones.
I found my caps on eBay for less than 10 bucks for a pack of 5. Make sure you get the correct voltage ratings and orient them properly on the board.

Let me know if this worked out for you.

I had a weird issue with my Fuel though it was somewhat different. I could not install miniroot to the disk once I booted it up from the Installation and Tools Overlay CD. It just kept failing even though the drive tested ok. Drove me nuts until I pinpointed that the problem was either the onboard HBA or the SCSI cable which I tried to re-seat many times over. I even tried a different active terminator on the cable thinking that's what it was but it wasn't. So I purchased another cable (thanks Doug) and that turned out to be the fix. I can only count on one hand the number of bad internal ribbon cables (IDE, SCSI, etc.) that I had come across over the years. I had good reason to suspect it though. The cable that came with the machine looked like it had been crumbled up a few times with creases all over it in every direction. Not good especially for SCSI.

I have 2 SPARCstation 5s, one running the RISC port of NextStep 3.3 on a 110 Mhz MicroSparc and the other is running LuBu OpenMagic on top of Solaris 7 on a 170 MHz TurboSparc. The 110 Mhz box used to be a Kodak photo kiosk which I turned back to a regular workstation. It has the "Kodak Digital Processor" logo on the front of it. Also have a few Sunblade 1500 workstations (UltraSPARC 3i processors) with an assortment of graphic cards.On the server side I'm running a couple of SUN T2000 servers, one headless and the other running with an XVR-200 graphics card. They both have the T1 8 core processor and they are both running Solaris 10. The oldest SUN I have is a SUN IPX in a SUN IPC case. But I hardly ever have the time to play with any of them much anymore.

These servers show up super cheap on eBay. I have this crazy idea of making one fit in a normal ATX case. It would involve a lot of metal work and faking all the fan signals. Are there any cheap PC video cards that will run under Solaris these days?

I don't know if you were asking about Solaris Intel or Solaris SPARC.

The only graphic options that I know of for the SUN T2000 are the XVR-200 and the XVR-300. The XVR-200 is a 1 lane PCI-e and the XVR-300 is an 8 lane PCI-e. The 300's go for about $200 and more so they are definitely not cheap. They use the ATI FireMV graphics engine and have 128 MB of video RAM and can drive two monitors. The 200's go for less since they are just 1 lane and 32 MB of RAM but can still be high. Luckily, one of mine came with a 200. I couldn't see paying the premium price for a 300.

SUN boxes need SUN cards in order to function with the OpenBoot firmware so standard PC cards won't work unless your going to install Solaris 10 on an Intel platform. If your going to run other SUN hardware like one of the more recent SunBlade machines (1500 or 2500 Red or Silver) then you can find cheaper cards on e**y like the XVR-100 or XVR-600 or even a PGX64. You can get these for $20.00 - $40.00 or so.

If your going the Intel route, I would check which video cards are supported on the Intel hardware compatibility list. What server board were you looking to use in an ATX case? That should be interesting.

Downloading all the friggin manuals that I can get my hands on from the SGI TPL, even for the machines I don't currently own. Doing it "just in case" the SGI TPL site goes belly up and we all start seeing 404 errors.

So what to do with the IDE-SCSI Convertor... ah.. WTF http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ACARD-AEC-772 ... SwPhdVGckA

Boy brother uunix, you sure fscking made out on that deal!!

After my failure of trying to get into POD on my Fuel, I eventually tried the same procedure on a totally different Fuel (my second one).
See topic http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16730201



At this point there is nothing. I can go back and forth between console and L1 modes but that's it. When I try to type in console mode, I get this:



I am assuming that once the debug switch is set to 0x010d that it should boot into POD directly.

Based on another thread about a Tezro having one of it's CPUs disabled, the same procedure is tried:



What am I missing here? Or is it that on a Fuel, its simply just "broken"? Has anyone ever been successful in doing this on a FUEL and if so, how did you do it?

I'm also trying to get some documentation on the use of the debug switches used on the L1 controller but the "L1 and L2 Controller Software User's Guide" doesn't venture into that territory. Is there a document that exists that does explain the debug switches?

Fuel? IIRC, the serial console is routed to one of the serial ports on the back panel, NOT to the L1. Somewhat of a nasty surprise, really, and I don't know how to change it, but there it is. Power up via the L1, then use a second serial connection or unplug/re-plug to the other port to get at the console.

Yep, there it is!
I thought that by doing a CTRL-D, the L1 would route me into the console mode but your right, it doesn't. It never occurred for me to physically switch to the serial port.Odd that it doesn't though since L1 says it can switch back and forth by using CTRL-D and CTRL-T.
Most of the time its the simple things isn't it?

Thank you much nyef! May the SGI gods be with you and I am forever grateful for your reply!

You can download any and all versions of the SunPCI software here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/docum ... 93027.html

Sorry, but those zips only include the documentation for the cards. It is misleading though.

You may have done this already so please excuse me if you have. When you re-seated the memory did you actually take out the modules and plug them back in again? If so, were they installed in the same order? If not, you may want to reorganize the modules in different slots. Work with a minimum memory configuration and only populate a set at a time to see if that resolves anything. I am not familiar with Octanes since I don't have one but you still may want to try that just in case.