The collected works of MrBill - Page 2

Forget stereo CD quality though.

I kind of figured as much. I found no mention of audio hardware on-line before purchasing the machine, so i assumed it did not have the capability. So it will not be suitable for watching movies like some kind of a large makeshift media center machine. Would have been cool. Guess there is still a reason to leave my octane at the desk. It will still get a ton of use though. I'm really trying to track down the IRIX software and development libraries, i would like to start learning how to compile and build stuff.

There is a Y2k issue? A webserver is completely out the window?

uunix wrote: Short for time? Dinosaur's seconds away from breaking down the door..? An operating system you know..? but only by flavour..? What you need is FSN.. The WORLDS slowest way to navigate a file system.. lucky there was a directory named security!

Not sure how hard it would be to build on irix, but there was some similar program called FSV i compiled on debian a few years back. that might be something interesting. Might be too big of a challenge for myself right off the bat though. Not a programmer and it looks to have a bunch of odd dependencies.

http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

not sure if it will take longer to compile or to use. so maybe?

That is a great solution, thanks. I'm still waiting to get a keyboard and mouse, and still have yet to fix the scsi issue. Regardless, I'm going to set it up to serve some files.

You have spent A ton of time looking into this. So the screen was not on a sgi at all and they just switched over to a mac?
The overview screen of the park you posted Would make a neat screen saver.

The crimson is only half of what I have been paying off.
I am scheduled to pick up a couple tezro's along with a crapload of irix software. Among the software is softimage, adobe stuff, and power animator, among a ton of other stuff. Tons of books too.
No sense getting a machine if i do not have the software to run on it.

I'm planing to rent a car and go pick it all up in February around my birthday.

Would something like a big beige At case fit the bill? I bought a couple of these and had a modern motherboard in it a while back.
Something similar to this : http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/5120/img1329zk.jpg

Challenge accepted, can you link picture? i got some fancy pants mac here at the shop and have it for a few more days till the owner picks it back up. might as well mess around with it while I've got it.

Does it make me crazy to have spent more on this stuff than my car?

Ah, convenient timing for a mac post. Me and a buddy picked up 5 mac se computers from a scrap center this past week. Still trying to get one to boot up. Those two floppy drives are slower than dirt. All the hard drives were failing, except for one, which happily booted and then failed 5 minutes later.

There is something picky about the mac formatter or installer, it will not work with non apple drives, so getting a working install onto one of the many scsi disks i have is not working.

Yeah, that is what I am looking for. Ive run into a bunch of sites giving you patching tools and a list of addresses to change to patch it yourself, it seems like a headache. I just want the darn patched utility. On top of that, until i get the drive working, im running off only 2 800k floppys. Space is limited, everything is in some compressed sit format, which seems like a good idea, but the extraction software is another program i have to put on the disk taking up precious space. I'm running out of floppy disk space just trying to get a minimal base system with the tools and utilities needed to set up a scsi disk.

I found a bunch of maxtor hard drives at the scrapyard today, I might see if any of those are usable and try to get a working hard drive install done tonight.

Is this all sold together or as individual cards? What are you asking for that ISA 3com etherlink II card?

Look at the signature, most of it is for sale. The reality is that i am not going to be using more than 1 octane at a time.

My crimson runs pretty much 24 / 7 and that does the job for most of what i need. I am trying to make room for an ibm as/400 mainframe and a couple of tezro's, so most of this other stuff can go. any offer will be considered. shipping will probally be a little high on the octanes due to the weight and cost of shipping material.

I need to focus on the gear that I will use. I stocked up on a bunch of these workstations and most does not get used aside from the octane.


House is full. more is on the way. need to make space.

selling :

3 octanes
2 indy's
1 indigo (working original install i got it with, bad battery)
1 indigo 2

the 4 node altix 350 can go to if i get a reasonable offer on it. I kinda like that one. shipping will probably be a hassle on that one.

i mean if i had the space for it, i could just keep going and see is the show hoarders will make an episode out of it.

Finally got these paid off and picked up. Picked up 2 tezro's yesterday. One was shown to me to get to the main menu on an attached monitor before purchase. The other does not power on. says "l1 running" on the lcd and does not power on with the button.

Anyhow, the other one, that was shown to be working, is not starting up once i got it home. I can press the power button and see that it is booting to the prom on the lcd, however after a time I get a flashing red light , and it says "GFX CFG ERR"

something pertaining to the graphics card? I am using one of my old dell monitors, known to play nice with my octanes, although i have it connected via dvi because that is what the tezro has. The monitor should not be the problem right?

Any tips to get it going would be much appreciated. I kind of mis judged the size of them, so while they are not running that will give me time to find a bigger desk.

I thank you all for the helpful advise. I am going to get a bigger spot of my current desk cleaned off and look it over better, thanks.They both rode side by side wrapped in blankets, strapped down, in the back seat of a 4 door truck, i do not think that something getting bumped loose is the issue, however i will look into it. I will post back soon.


To mopar 5150 - do you have any spare front covers for the tezro? The part with the light up sgi logo. Mine is all torn and tattered. Has a big bubble in it too. Not too pretty. Probably the least of my worries at this point, but it is bugging me.

Keyboard Was plugged into mouse port. That will do it.

Came right up. Ill try and get irix installed on it tonight.

I will post back with some pictures of the haul, i got a little more than expected. I filled the bed of the truck.

Heap of pictures to follow. No real good pictures of the tezro's yet. A bunch of FC and scsi disk arrays are not pictured either. Some misc hotmix cd's, softimage XSI and irix 5.3 install media not pictured either. other than that, this is everything i just picked up.

I bought many different copys of maya for IRIX, windows and linux. I have a heap of dell servers over here, thought i could see if it was possible to have them render things as a backend or something.

oh, forgot to mention, also got 2 octane card cages, a FC card for the octane, as well as an 8gb kit for the octane.

Can you give better info on what kind of card i need to interface with the Blue Sonic box? what kind of card do i need to connect to it, any hopes of finding one, or is it obscure and hard to find?

I do not really need the indy 5000 KVM, i have a heap of octanes, but i like my current monitor config. If it is of use to someone else I am open to offers on it.

No rush on the Crimson board, find it when you can and get back to me, thanks. I Am trying to get everything cataloged and organized so the crimson can wait for a while.

It's better than OS/400/i or the mainframe OSes, so be happy, I suppose...

I just bought an as/400 running os/400. password on the machine, and the machine turned out to be leased, it should not even exist still, so no chance of getting licenced software for it.
I found a copy of irix install media for sale and had my octane up and running within a week. the support and software released here are amazing. at least you can still get help and modern software ports through the forums here.

the as/400 is a doorstop without software. looks nice next to a crimson though with bits of red on the front cover though.

Picked this up a couple weeks back, I have not managed to get much done with it yet. It is much different than anything I have ever worked with. Boots up to a login screen, It may have valid working software license. 3 login attempts and then it becomes a loud doorstop from what I am told. I tried popping the scsi disks into a linux server and made images of all the drives, in the hopes that i could make some sense of what is on there and get the password. Now the machine no longer boots up. Not sure what the issue is. Any helpful advice is appreciated, although i still have much more reading to do.

Tried qsecofr-qsecofr. No dice.

I wrote the position of each drive down, and double checked before powering it back on. not the case.
The disks were not even mounted. I just used the sgutils package under linux to make images of the drives.

you just turn the key to service mode

My system is not cool enough to use a key, although there should be some way to do it from that front panel, not sure yet. More reading needs to be done.

I ran into the issue of the machine being started up to the login screen, and locking myself out with too many incorrect tries, and the power button does not shut the machine back off. Its loud and it was late, And the thing is next to my bed, after 3 days i got fed up with the noise and unplugged the thing. I did that a couple of times, it would throw some errors on the front panel, and after a long time would start back up.

Admit it: you're just trying to beat pentium at this AS/400 game.

That is a hard machine to trump with my current space and power limitations. Also my machine is not taller than me, or big enough to lean on, so he has me beat there. Come to think of it, his signature has a pile of stuff too. not trumping that any time soon either.

My signature is getting bigger in the sgi department though, I need to make a little As400 icon.

If i can get it to load up back to the login screen i can try it in upper / lower case.

I wonder if they were indeed written to? AS/400 formats the drives in really odd sector sizes of 520 bytes or even 528 bytes.

I am uncertain if the drives were written to. I never attempted to mount them. I was told DD would not be up to the task, so i used sgutils instead to make the Disk images. Some of the older versions of as/400 seem to have used DES as the encryption scheme, i am not sure if that still apply s to the version I am using. My plan was to dig around and see if i can find the hash and crack it. probably a lost cause.

I will look into buying the book. I want to understand how it works a little better.
The guy at the resale place i bought it from said I would never get in, that is what has been driving me to get it up and running.
I am not really sure what to even do with it if I get it going. Any other good books on the system?

Any recommendations for a good van or truck? I am going to have some sgi computers shipped to me pretty soon, costing a small fortune because of the weight. Figured for the next time i would get a good van or truck and make the trip myself.Need to get out of florida, could take a break from it for a while, may as well make a trip out of it. Anyone gone on any trips to pick up gear, any recommendations for a good vehicle that would be up for the task? Something that would be up for a long haul that would not be prone to major problems. i would prefer more storage area over fuel economy. plan is to load it up.
I rented a uhaul 12x6 trailer in the past,when i picked up the pdp 11 and related gear, that worked pretty well, so maybe ill just get a real good truck and rent the trailer as needed.
I am open to suggestions, never really made a big trip before, but want to start getting things together so next time something good comes along i am ready to pick it up.

It lives.

foetz wrote: you have 2 crimsons?

yeah, a little shocked myself. Parts are expensive, gotta stock up.

I do intend to get irix 6.2 installed once i can get the install media to cooperate.

The other crimson does apear partly functional, the io3 board throws errors at bootup, however one chanel still does function, might be able to get it running, or some kind of net boot setup again.

Picked this up about a week ago, still getting it cleaned up.

Oh, also a ASR33 teletype. Not exactly dec, but its going to be the main console for my 11/34, so its kinda relevant.

Contrary to what the pictures look like, i did not take a bite out of the corner O.o
The corosion is quite bad in the corner. Power supply is quite crusty as well. I am thinking about replacing the power supply with a modern atx variant with some over voltage protection, etc, to protect the boards better than that behemoth of a power supply.

that is the tape controller mounted above the card cage, correct. kinda an odd setup.
It does have 2 TU58 drives in it, although they need new capsans and i have no tapes. I fail to see the point though, it attaches via serial and can redially be emulated with a dos pc and a serial cable. I could do away with tape read errors all together. It just seems like a finicky tape setup from the get go to me. Maybe ill get the drives going if i can get a bunch of tapes for a good price. Again though, i have a 9 track tape drive in a full size rack over here that is known working and i can get the tapes for $15 a reel, ill stick with the known working drive in the rack for now.

The grey board is a boot board. looks home brewed. The machine was custom built in some university in Illinois, thats all the story i got on it. The seller said that there is a second machine just like it, i do not see myself needing another of this particular design. Quiet and tiny compared to the 11/34 rack.

Ive been meaning to get a webserver going for a while now but it keeps getting aside for other projects.

I installed the lighttpd server from nekoware. i now have a /usr/nekoware/lighttpd folder.

I am uncertain of how to configure the server and where files are supposed to go, etc.

I also keep putting off creating a proper symlink so i can call things in /usr/nekoware bin. I have not been able to read the documentation for lighttpd either. again, i think i need to make a sym link to the man pages or something, but i am not sure.

Aside from the power requirements of leaving a onyx2 running, any security reason i should not run a web facing server? Even if it is behind a firewall, are there any major vulnerable things that are running out of box that can be removed or disabled if not needed?

I might do some testing on a little sgi indy at the office as well because it is quiet and takes less power.

Much appreciated on the info on sitting up the paths.

Only seems to be working on csh though. I use bash myself too, and it does not seem to make any effect when added to bashrc.

Thanks for the reccomendation for httpi. Might work good too. Just looking for a webserver to host some music and a tiny php forum.

I picked up a GMC 2500 van. Pictures soon.

I figured it would be a good investment to pick up some gear in the future.

While at the scrapyard, i noticed a pile of dell poweredge 1850 and 2850 servers, they had been there a while and were on the list of things to be dismantled. Upon closer inspection, i found they were all still loaded with drives, most of the 300GB size. They did not have the equipment set up to wipe drives on site, i dragged a couple of the servers to the back room and got them loaded with drives to wipe. this is my 3rd day driving an hour to the yard to pick up drives and load up more to be wiped. Sad to see the 2850 servers are going to be ripped apart, i have one myself, pretty good machines.

Anyhow, i think that will be the last scsi hard drive i need to buy in this lifetime. If anyone has rackmount scsi enclosures, i would be interested in buying them.

I should have many more smaller 18 and 36 gb drives if anyone has a need for some of them let me know. I'm going to keep a few of the smaller drives around as spares for my indy's an indigo 2.

I picked up a sgi origin along with my deskside onyx 2 a while back. Its been sitting mostly offline because i have been missing the bottom plate to prop it up to get airflow. What kind of hardware is needed to bolt this into a rack? Does this behemoth slide out on giant rails or something? Is anyone here looking to part with mounting rails?

i bought a thing with money.

it is sold. i drive to get it saturday.