The collected works of Trippynet - Page 1

I use my O2 purely for experimentation at the moment, and because I have a soft spot for it. Recently, I've dusted it off and have been enjoying trying to get it to do things it never used to do, like run quietly, run a modern monitor, play MP3s and that sort of thing. Nekochan has been immensely useful for this, and it's good fun!

My first introduction to SGI was in the latter part of the 90s. My dad was working for the Virtual Reality centre at a local university (as a mainly PC tech) and I was about 13 years old. They had a pile of Indigo 2s for 3D modelling, a lab full of Indys (for the students to learn on) and the main virtual reality auditorium consisted of a curved screen and triple projector setup which was powered by an Onyx 10000. Back in the 90s when I was used to a standard PC being a Pentium 166 with Windows 95, 16MB of RAM and a 3.2GB hard drive, I was amazed by this 1.6 million pound computer with 12 MIPS R10000 CPUs, 512MB of RAM and 40GB of disk. And the immersive 3D graphics it could produce on that huge screen for the time were amazing!

After a couple of years, they upgraded to a fully hemishperical virtual reality auditorium powered by 7 projectors and a brand new Onyx 2 to drive it all. The 3D developers kit had also expanded to include various Octanes and other later SGI machines. Again, sitting there in a fully 180 degree hemispherical 3D screen back in 2000 was an incredible experience.

Then in 2004, one of the guys I knew there told me that they were scrapping the old Indy lab and I acquired 3 fully working Indys for free. They only had 133MHz R4400 CPUs, 1GB hard drives and 128MB of RAM, but I loved finally having a couple of the things for myself (I gave the third away to a friend). The PSU in one of them blew (as expected), and they haven't been powered up for years, but I still have the pair of them and as far as I know, one is in fully working condition, as is the second apart from the duff PSU.

Then 2 years after that, I acquired 2 O2s for free from the University as well after they scrapped their final SGI labs and replaced them with cheap Linux powered PCs. One of the O2s was a dead one purely for spares, but the other was fully working and still is my main SGI machine. Initially, I used it a lot and experimented with it. I added a second 18GB disk, set up Sharity on it then used a perl script to mirror all my MP3s to it. It then served as a usual jukebox alongside my PC (allowing me to use the PC monitor for gaming etc whilst simultaneously being able to control all my music with XMMS). Then my MP3 collection outgrew the hard drive in it and I finally popped it into the loft and bought a PPC Mac Mini for playing with along side my PC.

And then, last month I moved house, got a bigger desk, moved my 4 SGI machines and thought "Hey, lets fire up the O2 again and have a play with it!". And here we are. Old, slow and clunky by today's standards, but a clean/streamlined OS and of course it's a beautiful little machine, despite being around 15 years old!

I'll have to dust off my digital camera. Note that it's just a rather messy desk with an O2 & granite keyboard sitting next to a 27" TFT with a PC under the desk. Nothing special, although the O2 is in pretty immaculate physical condition, despite spending many years in a University student lab. The other O2 is physically in fairly bad shape and the Indys are currently in a cupboard under the stairs.

Oh, and one other thing I've since remembered which amazed me back in the 90s. Apart from the glorious purple Indigo 2s which scattered the developers lab (a far cry from the boring beige PCs of the time), the other thing I found amazing was that each one had a enormous 21" CRT as well. Again, back when the average PC had a 15" screen and a high end PC had a 17" screen, it was quite a sight.

Must admit, I'd love to own an Indigo 2 at some point...

Well as promised, here's a couple of pictures of my (rather modest) setup. The O2 (after being modded) is quiet enough to sit on my desk and only makes a faintly audible hum. Also out of sight are a Mac Mini (which via bridged connections and a switch is providing wireless Internet access to my PC and O2). There's also a 4 port KVM hidden away as well (can't work with the O2 apart from for video as it doesn't like my PC based keyboard/mouse).



And here's my O2 with IRIX 6.5.30 running on a 27" monitor at 1920x1200...

It's a turntable (I've got a nice collection of modern and old vinyls). The supposed 7" vinyl you see is actually from a set of about 4" coffee coasters designed to look like vinyls (not playable unfortunately).

O2 wise, I've been having a few problems getting Sharity 3 to work (might have to discuss it on their forums) before it can become a proper music/web/play machine. All that's now remaining from a nostalgic point of view (once I get some funds) is an Indigo 2 IMPACT machine

So, I want a way to allow my little O2 to easily access file shares from my Windows 7 machine. In years gone by, I had an academic license for Sharity 2 and this worked well on my old Indy and on my O2. However since then, my license for Sharity has long since gone AWOL.

What I've tried so far:

Uninstalling Sharity 2.0 and trying Sharity 3.0 in free mode (I can live with one mounted share). The problem is that after installing it and then searching for my PC, the Sharity daemon locks up solid. Like, absolutely solid. After waiting for 10 minutes, I tried to shut the O2 down and it hung during shut down and required a holding press of the power button to switch it off.

I've also tried installing an NFS Server program on my Windows machine, such as the haneWIN NFS server. After setting up a share with it and disabling the Windows firewall, the O2 bluntly refuses to see any mapped shares at all on my PC.

So, once again I'm unfortunately forced to ask the question "am I missing something ridiculously obvious"?

As I've mentioned in another thread, I was introduced to SGI machines at Teeside University's Virtual Reality centre. I marvelled over how sleek they looked and the kind of stuff they could do. They also had a couple of labs of Indys (and later O2s).

Around 2001, one of the guys from the VR centre I knew told me that they had decommissioned the labs of Indys. I secured 3 of them for free (one of which I gave to a friend). They were only R4600 133s with 128MB of RAM, but at last I had my very own Silicon Graphics machine! I loved playing around on one of the Indys (with the other as a spare). I still have both of them in a cupboard downstairs, although they haven't been powered up for years.

Then a couple of years after this, Teesside University decommissioned the lab of O2s and again, I managed to secure two of them (one working, one dead). I used the dead one to upgrade the working one (doubling the RAM to 256MB and putting 2 HDDs into it - all of which worked fine until DIMM slot 7 on the board failed recently, which is why I'm down to 192MB of RAM). My O2 was used a lot for a few years alongside my PC (with a second monitor) until lack of disk space and my shortage of money to upgrade it meant that it was put into storage.

Many years later after moving house, I acquired four 300GB hard drives from a server at work that was being binned, pulled the O2 back out and threw it back into service (with a massive HDD increase and an unfortunate RAM decrease), then discovered Nekochan!

I love doing random experimenting and playing around on my O2, playing music, those sort of things. Unfortunately the web has moved on a lot from the early 2000s, so whilst it could ably display old web pages, it's rather sluggish on modern ones. I'm also strongly looking at buying an Indigo 2 from Ian Mapleson myself as it's the SGI machine I covet the most and I'd love to have a nice purple one sitting on my desk

Biggie for me would be (limited) support for CSS. Neko Dillo doesn't support CSS at all I believe, whereas Dillo 3 does have basic support. And anything that improves rendering of pages without the speed penalties of modern browsers gets a thumbs-up from me!

Thanks to the nice Mr Mapleson, I'm now the happy owner of an Indigo2 - a system I've always wanted. Mine only has SolidIMPACT (High and Max are a bit too pricey for me). On the plus side, it does have a 100Mb NIC installed.

Anyway! Here's the hinv:



Next project (once the bits arrive) is to try and make the thing run a bit quieter. SolidIMPACT should be capable of being cooled by a fan with a slightly lower CFM rating - especially in northern Scotland! So, I've just bought a couple of nice Zalman fans for it. They still shift a fair bit of air and should make for a nice compromise. I'll update you with the results once they arrive!

Oh, and one final point: Any idea if compiling a custom VFO is the same for the Indigo2 as it was for my O2? Managed to get 1400x900 working on the O2, but I'm not sure if this might be beyond SolidIMPACT's capabilities.

As very few of you will know (given by the lack of any response to my thread in the hinv forum - I guess Indigo2 hinvs aren't hot topics like they used to be), I've recently bought my most coveted SGI system - an Indigo2 IMPACT from the nice Mr Mapleson. And as expected for a high-end machine from the mid 90s, it's rather loud in comparison to modern machines.

So immediately, I decided to have a go at decreasing its decibel level quite dramatically. This was done in the knowledge that I live in the North of Scotland (so it's always cold), and the system only has SolidIMPACT (so no TRAM modules and only a single-slot card to worry about). The decision was to try and replace all three of the fans in it with modern, quiet fans - but ones which are still supposed to deliver a reasonable amount of airflow. Going by the excellent work of Megatron-UK on the specs of the original fans here , I was aiming for new fans that would still have 75-85% airflow of the originals, whilst being a more modern and quieter design.

Based on that, I bought two Zalman ZM-SF2 fans (rated airflow 43CFM compared with 55CFM for the original), and a StarTech FAN6X1TX3 for the CPU - 60mm x 10mm fans are bloody difficult to find, this one was bought on the basis that it had 17 year-old newer bearings and so should be quieter. The new fans are here (click for bigger pics!):



Next step was to open up the Indigo2, remove the 5 1/4" drive bay, SolidIMPACT card, EISA NIC and the riser. The system now looked like this, notice how nicely Ian cleaned it up before he sent it to me!:



Here is the riser with the old (but clean) Panaflo fan fitted to it:



The old Panaflo fan was removed, and the new fan was attached. Although the new fan has a 3-pin cable, it's straightforward to connect it to the 2-pin socket on the riser board with one of the pins of the plug floating in free air. Oh! and I also reversed the flow of the fan on my system - default was to blow air OUT at the front, and I don't like fans at the front and back both trying to extract air.

EDIT: Turns out it's a bit more difficult! The Indigo2 fan headers use a reversed polarity to the pins on a standard 3-pin fan. Basically, you need to use a screwdriver to pop the live and neutral pins out from the fan, then plug them in the other way around. Plug the fan onto the header and all will be well.

Anyway! Riser now looked like this:



Next was the CPU fan. This was a bit more difficult as the HUGE heatsink has recesses for the two screws to go into. The new fan didn't, so I had to "gently" remove two bits of plastic with a hacksaw so that it fitted flush into the heatsink. Not too difficult, and only took 5 minutes to do. Furthermore, the connector next to the heatsink is right next to a power transistor, so I had to physically trim the 3-pin plug down to the size of two pins (and remove the tacho cable). Here's the old and new fans, note the two missing bits of plastic on the corners of the new fan on the left, plus the trimmed connector.



With that done, it slots in nicely. Oh, and note that I subsequently noticed that the SGI fan has the live/neutral pins reversed, so I also had to pop the two connectors out the trimmed plug and swap them over so it'd work.



Next step was the PSU fan. Now the PSU contains lethal voltages, so I VERY carefully opened it up, then removed the input connector and removed the fan. The top board which springs out of the way is the danger one to avoid touching. Anyway, here it is with no fan:



...And again with the new fan fitted and the input connector replaced:

NOTE: Again, the PSU fan connector has a reversed polarity compared with a modern 3-pin fan. Again, the live/neutral connectors from the new fan need to be popped out and swapped over, before it's connected up (NOT shown in these pics!)



...And all screwed back together again:



Now, here's the Indigo2 with the PSU, riser, expansion cards and 5 1/4" drive bay all re-fitted:



Now at this point, I fired it up with the lid off to make sure that all the fans were working. They were, but the CPU fan - although quieter than before - was still noisy. As I said earlier, the StarTech fan was not designed to be a super quiet fan, just a new fan. So! Both Zalman fans came with a resistor expansion which drops the voltage, plus the heatsink for the R10000 is HUGE and the CPU doesn't dissipate a ridiculous amount of heat, so I added one of the resistors to the CPU fan like this, then tidied it away (second picture):




Last but not least, tried it again. The CPU fan still spins at a reasonable rate, produces a noticeable draft of air, but is MUCH quieter. So, feeling much happier I put the lid back on. And here's the final Indigo2 (sorry for the poor image quality, my phone flash ain't great!):



The results: The system is now VERY quiet. By far the loudest part is the 15k HDD inside. The fans are all spinning nicely and there's still a comfortable breeze coming from them. After running it for a while with the lid on, there's no ill effects, and the heat output from the system seems fine.

EDIT: The Zalman fans were spinning too slow originally as I'd connected them wrong, and the PSU heat level was too high. After fixing the polarity of the fan connectors and trying again, all is now well with noise and heat!

Note that I would think twice about this if I either had MaxIMPACT, or lived in a hot country. But for Scotland, the only audible noise my system now makes is the whine of the HDD. Might try it with a 10k drive to see if the noise/performance difference is worth it

Either way, turning an Indigo2 into a nice, quiet system is relatively straightforward and only cost me about £10 in new fans!

Edit2: Attached the images locally so they no longer rely on external hosting

Thanks for the feedback! I must admit that the Indigo2 was probably quite comparable with PCs of the 90s era as well when it first cam along, however I have been a bit of a sucker for a quiet system over the last handful of years (although not to ridiculous levels mind you). My PC has 2 12cm fans from QuietPC and a gigantic quiet CPU cooler on, hence it's whisper quiet. My O2 used to have a noisy fan, but this was replaced with the Nocturna one recommended on Neko. Result is that it's virtually silent when turned on, and only makes a bit of noise once the two HDDs fire up into life. Heat output from it is absolutely fine.Then again, it only has an R5000 in it.

As for the Indigo2, the heat output from the SolidIMPACT card is absolutely fine at the moment (only lukewarm air coming out the vents at the back, even if the heatsink on the card itself is quite warm). The CPU heatsink is warm but not hot to the touch, and can be easily touched for a prolonged period after an hour of use without any problems/burning skin. Only bit I find slightly concerning is that the PSU is definitely kicking out some seriously warm air at the moment, probably about 35-40 degrees or so. QuietPC do another Zalman fan with a higher air throughput (it's about 56CFM compared with 43CFM for the current fan) and it's only about £4, so I might have a go at fitting a slightly higher-rated fan to the PSU to try and help here. Like I say, it's all about trying to balance noise with making sure that my Indigo2 still receives adequate cooling.

Oh, and I can confirm that the HDD in the Indigo2 is not exactly noisy as such - certainly not when compared to the old 50pin HDDs I used to run in my Indy! It's a 36GB 15K 80pin drive being run through an 80->50 adaptor (the drive Ian mentions above). However, it is definitely the noisiest part of the system, but even then it's still just a fairly quiet hum in the background. To be honest, I'll probably keep it as it is. Either way, it's not much louder than my PC, and can happily sit there next to my desk without the noise being distracting now - which was the whole point!

Edit: I've decided that I won't be going down the SSD route. It's just not worth it IMO given the costs involved when the system only has a 10MB SCSI connection on it. After all, I'm not *that* bothered about the noise! Now in a Fuel, Tezro or even an Octane with the right SCSI card, it's a different story...

Hang on a sec, Trip. Just one point. Windows 95, bless its little DOS heart, came out at the end of 1995. The Pentium Pro (180 and 200 mhz) came out some time around then. Around 1998 I had a neighbor with a purple Indigo2 which made my hot-to-trot peecee look like that retarded kid on the Special Olympics poster. The Indigo2 throughout the 90's would kick peecee ass both in hardware and software, from here to Uranus

Err... we're talking about noise output here, not computing performance. I'm well aware that an Indigo2 IMACT will trounce a mid 90s PC when it comes to performance

OK, an update to this:

First of all, I was becoming increasingly concerned about the heat of the PSU, so I went ahead and bought a new fan with a higher CFM rating for the PSU. Fitted it, powered up the system, and the fan refused to spin. So as it's a 3pin connector (2 pin plug in the PSU), I opened it up again and moved it across by one pin. Still refused to spin!

This time, I did a chunk more digging around and found that ALL THREE of the SGI fan connectors have their polarity reversed from those on a 3-pin connector. Manually popped the pins out, reversed the live/neutral, connected all back up and the new fan roared into life (almost as loud as the original). Of course at this point, I was admittedly a bit confused as to why the Zalman fans in post 1 were working at all as these were connected with the original pinouts.

Long story short, it turns out that I had them connected with the live and tacho pins, but not the neutral. Amazingly, they still span when connected like this, but after swapping the pins around and connecting them up again, they spin MUCH faster and yet only make a fairly quiet hum.

So to cap it all, I now have the white Zalman fans fitted again in the PSU and expansion tray, but with the live and neutral pins connected correctly. Air output from them is about twice what it was before and the PSU is now emitting heat which I consider to be perfectly acceptable. The Indigo2 does make a noticeable noise now, but it's much quieter than it was with the stock fans.

I'll update the first post with this new info!

I would recommend talking to Ian Mapleson at http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/indigo2.html

His purple Indigo2s start at £140, and that's with a full installation of IRIX and various other extras. Bought the one in my sig from him and have been very happy with it indeed. He's based in Edinburgh and shipping around the UK isn't too expensive.

Fair enough, see what people have. If that fails, my experience has shown that Ian's systems are a damn sight cheaper than anything I've found on eBay however.

Must admit, I'd be intrigued to see a few benchmarks of the R12000 next to the 195MHz R10000 to see how big the performance jump is!

It's a difficult one for me. I wouldn't say I "collect" them per-se, it's just me trying to get hold of a piece of computing history and owning a piece of kit that (when I was about 13 years old) first made me properly say "wow!" when I saw what it looked like and what it was capable of at the time.

Now, I've moved on from my earlier post in this thread and I am indeed the proud owner of my most favourite SGI machine - an Indigo2 IMPACT. Even now, I still play around on it once or twice a week, and it still gives me a buzz to see it sitting there all purple and gorgeous in the corner of my room.

Over the last couple of days I've been "decommissioning" my O2 and preparing it for storage (copying all my useful data off, pulling the 300GB hard drives out, cloning the OS onto two smaller HDDs for storage and possible future use). The reason? It's being replaced with the one other SGI machine I've always wanted to own - a Fuel. Reason being that when I acquired my Indys, it was SGI's current IRIX machine (along with the Tezro) that they were selling (I always remember seeing it proudly displayed on SGI's site), and it also ended up being part of the final generation of MIPS/IRIX machines.

Oh, and the missus says I'm only allowed 2 SGIs in my office room - hence why the O2 has to make way. Still, it hardly gets used anyway now I have the Indigo2. To me historically, the I2 is just a more special machine. The O2 (to me) was always designed as a budget machine (well, as budget as SGI get) and was used for teaching the students. The Indigo2 though was the high-end machine of its time and was used by the professional 3D developers.

Looks cool, I like it!

Might be worth trying DINA. This is useful for isntalling IRIX over a network.

Edit: Link is here: http://dina.harrydebug.com/

It's also possible to compile new display modes as well, although it can be a bit of a faf. I managed to compile a 1920x1200 display mode for my O2 which worked fairly well (bit of corruption) and a 1600x900 display mode which worked perfectly.

VFC is the Video Format Compiler for IRIX. It's not installed by default though, so you'll need a set or IRIX CDs in order to add it. A useful page of info I've found which may help is here: http://dart.ncsa.uiuc.edu/slevy/o2-stereo/highres.html

It does, but the VFO files it creates are machine specific. Hence ones you compile on an O2 will not work on an Octane. You'd have to take the source VFS files and re-compile them.

Should be possible, but do note that there's a timing bug with V6/V8 graphics which restricts the pixel clock that they can use. There's some useful information in the wiki about it and which display modes will and won't work on these cards. Of course, if you've got V10/V12, this isn't an issue, plus the issue doesn't apply to the older IMPACT graphics either (although lack of memory restricts what display modes these can handle, although there is a 1600x1200 mode on my SolidIMPACT Indigo2).

I'm an IT Site Leader for a very large global company (who shall remain anonymous).

I've found that newly compiled modes have always shown up for me, even when they haven't worked. Make sure that the compiled file has the right extension and is in the correct folder with the other VFO files. Note also that some display adaptors call the compiled files with an SDB extension instead. They're basically the same files, so make sure the extensions of the ones you've compiled match and rename them if they don't.

V10 is reasonable enough so long as you can live with the lower texture RAM. If you can, the lack of the pixel clock bug and improved performance are nice. Of course, throw anything with a moderate amount of textures at it and it'll quickly fall behind your V8 for performance!

Possible, yes. Easy, no. Depending on your LCD, another option is to try dropping the refresh rate. You might be able to get it down to 30-40Hz in order to get within the lower range for example. On an LCD, this isn't as noticeable as you might think for most bits.

It seems to be this mad push towards simplicity at the moment which is (IMO) going too far. Granted earlier versions of Mac OS X and Windows 7 for that matter maybe had a bit too much skeuomorphism going on and were a bit overly flashy in places, but it now seems that they're hell bent on going back to basics to an extreme level.

The launcher now looks like the block we used to have back in 10.4 (Tiger) and the sheer flatness of it is getting silly. The only win there is that there's still a drop shadow on the window. Windows 8 of course has gone even further. No shadows, no shading, no rounded corners, just flat, lifeless squares (and I'm talking about the desktop here). For all the criticism that Metro has had, the Windows 8 desktop is frankly a depressing place to be due to how flat and bland it is. Even Windows 3.1 and IRIX have more rounded/designed GUI elements than that!

Yeah, my Mac Mini media centre machine (PowerPC) runs Leopard as well, although it did have Tiger on it when I first got it.

In my opinion on this, MS shot themselves in the foot with Windows 8 and badly at that. The reason simply being that they wanted to abuse their monopoly position with Windows to force their way into the tablet/phone market. They wanted to create a unified and touch-based interface that they would force onto Windows users to make them get used to it. Then they hoped that these same users would see a Windows tablet or Windows phone and think "Hey, looks just like my PC!".

Of course, instead the response from a lot of people has been "this interface looks like an abomination", followed by further frustration when they realise that the Start Menu isn't even a selectable option and are hence avoiding Windows 8 PCs (and developing an infinite dislike of it). As a knock-on effect, a certain chunk of these are then seeing the same interface on a tablet/phone and thinking "urgh, looks like Windows 8" - even though the interface is a lot more usable on a touch device. If anything, by forcing Metro on the PC, they've actually damaged the reputation of it on mobile.

Hence my original point. MS tried to force the market towards their own vision and it has backfired. Now they have no real alternative but to backtrack on the desktop by re-introducing the start menu for Windows 9 along with other such features that they originally dumped. Of course, they've then got to support both the minority group that like Metro, and the group of people who are sufficiently alienated that they'll never use it - no matter how much MS tweaks it around. MS have been left with a real headache here, and it's all of their own doing.

Of course, having used Windows 8 myself, Metro is only part of the problem. I also cannot stand the flat, lifeless and definition-less desktop in it. No shading, no shadows, no rounded corners. It's just a dire and depressing place to be. And as mentioned earlier in the thread, it's a pity as the core of Windows 8 is quite good. It's a far cry from Vista which came out with an average UI and a poor core OS (well, until MS had heavily patched it). Windows 7 proved what could be done by fixing and maturing the core of Vista, tidying up the interface a bit, then adding some genuinely useful tweaks and features. Hence how well received it was.

Edit: And to stop this from being totally off-topic, OSX is getting too flat for my liking, but at least they are still trying to make it look visually appealing.

In a nutshell, not for me. I prefer my rock music

Personally, the MIPS machines are the only ones I am interested in. As with all older machines, there's going to be trade-offs and you've listed a fair few already.

Indigo2 is a pretty bullet-proof reliable system, so long as the capacitors are in good shape. To try and demonstrate, due to a slight mis-hap with an SCA to 50-pin SCSI adaptor, I recently ended up placing a dead short across my Indigo2 whilst it was in use. A few sparks, the system powered off, but everything in it survived fine and it powered straight back up with no ill-effects once I fixed the problem. Not many PSUs of that age would accept such treatment without a smoky "boom!". Of course, performance is always going to be limited due to its age, but the 195MHz R10000 is still perfectly capable of running IRIX 6.5 at a comfortable speed. Note that the higher end graphics options are EXPENSIVE. But for basic IRIX and none-textured 3D software development, SolidIMPACT is fine. Hand on heart, out of my machines (see signature), my Indigo2 is my favourite.

O2 is a nice little system, but unless you utilise the strengths of the architecture specifically, you'll find that for general tasks it will be outperformed by other systems with similar CPUs. However, it's small and can be made VERY quiet if you replace the PSU fan (my old one was nearly silent by the time I'd finished with it).

Fuel is a great system and a good chunk faster than Indigo2, but difficult to find these days at a reasonable price. I was very fortunate to pick one up for an acceptable price from Ian Mapleson before he ran out of spare parts and almost doubled the price of his systems as a result. Of course, it also suffers in places from cheaper components (ie, the PSU) because of the way SGI was going by the early 2000s, but one in good condition can run nice and reliably.

Personally, I'd recommend an earlier system such as an Indigo2, low-end Octane or O2 for starters as they're much more reasonably priced. Then if you get "bitten by the bug", you can start shopping around for a Fuel, Tezro or Octane2 at a later date

Video adapters are what most of us use (that or old CRTs). My Fuel is DVI, but my Indigo2 runs via a 13W3 to VGA adapter. O2 does have standard VGA out, so this might increase its appeal to you. Of course, you'll still need a monitor that supports Sync on Green for it...

I'm afraid the PSU is proprietary. What I'd try for starters though is to open it up and remove any none-essential components to see if it can power up. A failure of various components can place a short across the PSU and prevent it from turning on, so remove the HDDs, graphics card and RAM, then try it again for starters.

Only word of caution I'd give is that a lot of earlier switch mode power supplies need a load of some sort to be placed across them, even if it's not a big one. Don't know for sure if this applies to the Indigo 2's PSU, but it's worth bearing in mind if you try to read voltage levels from it whilst powered up with nothing connected.

I agree. There's hard drives, packs of RAM and all-sorts in there.

AFAIK, the connector at the back is not a standard SCA connector. It's simply a proprietary connector that SGI used on the Indigo2 to allow them to use their own quick-release drive sleds.

Both the hard drives in my Indigo2 are SCA ones and it's a simple matter of connecting the ribbon and power cables up to the 50->80 adapter, then connecting up the HDD. It's a bit of a snug fit for a 3.5" drive, but they do fit fine. Only thing to be careful of is that the power pins of the connector do not make contact with the metal chassis of the hard drive. I have a piece of cardboard wedged between the adapter and hard drives in my system to protect against this. Initially I had some gaffer tape and that wasn't enough. Still, at least I found out that the PSU of the Indigo2 is resilient enough to withstand a short being placed across it whilst in use

Thing is, having had a good look around, the first challenge would be to buy the connectors in the first place (they don't seem to be easy to acquire by themselves). Then you have the issue that most SCSI connectors for ribbon cables are designed to be easily clamped onto the cables, but SCA was never designed to be connected to a cable, hence there's a lot of very fiddly soldering that would be required.

The third issue is the lack of mounting clips or anything to hold the connector in place. SCA is designed to be much lower in friction than 50/68 pin connectors (which use the friction between plug/socket to keep the cable attached), and is designed to use the physical case mounting of the hard drive's bracket to hold the contacts of the connector in place.

Result would be the difficulty of acquiring the connectors, lots of fiddling to solder the thing properly, the fact that the HDD itself would be loose, and that it would not take much to get the connectors/cable to work loose (over time, vibrations from the HDD/fans might be enough).

I can't help but think from a "KISS" point of view that just attaching a 50pin>SCA adaptor to the HDD then bolting it to the proper Indigo2 cradle is actually likely to be a quicker, simpler and far more robust solution and that you'd only go down the custom-cable route if you really wanted a challenge. I'd be interested to see it done of course, but just saying...

TeamBlackFox wrote: I'm done with x86 hardware dying and costing me $300, $400+ to replace. This box lasted a scant three weeks of being on 24/7, that is just pitiful. I'm not willing to continue to play Intel and AMD's games of planned obsolescence either.

Bear in mind that this is more down to bad luck and the quality of individual components than anything else. There's a huge gulf of reliability between the good and bad bits. We have dozens of servers where I work that are x86 and have been running for 6+ years 24/7 without a single hiccup. A lot of it depends on the level of kit you buy. Get a half-decent PSU, motherboard and RAM and you should have many years of reliable service. Buy a crap board or a cheapo PSU and you're far more likely to have issues.

Basically, it's the individual components themselves, not the architecture itself which is the problem.

By the way, another option is a PowerPC based Mac of course if you're wanting to avoid the x86 world of things - assuming you're not requiring new kit of course!

Blimey, and my missus grumbled a bit about me adding an Indigo2 and a Fuel to my collection. Dread to think what she'd have said if one of those showed up on my doorstep.

Nice unit mind you! It does make a change to see a none-MIPS box showing up here

Out of interest, what libraries does SeaMonkey use these days? I know that the interface of the current IRIX port is far more responsive than Firefox's interface, and of course current SeaMonkey uses up-to-date versions of Gecko and SpiderMonkey. Wondering if it might be more feasible to port than recent versions of Firefox - which I seem to remember were just a bridge too far for IRIX.

Jan-japp is correct. For Indigo2, maximum RAM is 1GB for the R10000 models, but the R4400 model like yours tops out at 384MB.

Hard drives are not a problem. Indigo2 can happily run with 2 300GB SCSI drives with the right adaptors. My own one has a 36GB 15K drive and a 300GB 10K drive, both with SCA to 50 pin adaptors.

@jan-jaap - I have had some HDDs fail to work in an Indigo2. I have two different models of 300GB SCA drives. One model works fine in my Indigo2, the other doesn't. Both work fine in my O2 however, so there is a compatibility issue there somewhere!