The collected works of Trippynet - Page 7

IAMNOTDEFECTIVE wrote:

Trippynet wrote:

IAMNOTDEFECTIVE wrote: Also I noticed I derped in the original post, I forgot to mention my display is actually a Ultrawide Monitor... Whoops! XP

However, in the end I found it easier to run my SGI machines through a conventional 20" 4:3 monitor and use my 16:10 monitor for my Windows machine and my Mac Mini - means I can interact with both SGIs and my PC at the same time too.

I said I had an Ultra Wide monitor, IE 21:9, so that would be a problem if you had a problem getting a 16:10 display working all honky dory.

Not necessarily. Either way you have to create a custom VFO if the resolution isn't supported natively by IRIX. That's the case for a lot of 16:10 and 16:9 monitors, so the same would hold for a 21:9 screen. So long as the graphics hardware can physically handle it, creating a custom VFO should be possible.

As I said, I was able to get my O2 to run at 16:10 resolutions, but not the Indigo2. However, the Indigo2 is a much older machine. With newer systems like Fuels and Octanes with the later graphics cards (V10/V12), compiling widescreen VFOs is not too much of a problem. Hence, getting your screen working is certainly a possibility!

That's what makes it a sketchy one when talking about "abandonware".

From a legal point of view, it's still propriety and licensed software, and hence it's illegal to distribute. On the other hand, if it now has zero commercial value to the company, then what's the point in spending money to clamp down on the distribution of something with no value? This is what "abandonware" sites rely on - distributing something illegally, but which has no value and hence no point in clamping down on, so the sites typically get left alone most of the time - unless a company involved decides that the software does still have value and hence takes action.

From a moral point of view, I don't see the issue with sharing and downloading something which is abandoned and valueless - especially when it's not possible to buy it any more. However, it's still technically illegal, which is why for little sites like Nekochan, it's a thorny issue which is best avoided where possible.

necron2600 wrote: My O2 however, could not get either type of those resolutions.

Ultra-wide resolution will be more of a challenge, if even possible (so far it seems not).

I did manage to get 1920x1200 working on my O2 with a custom VFO, but it was not without issues. There was some occasional graphical corruption in a few areas, and I think the resolution was simply pushing the little O2 a bit too far. Once I dropped it to 1680x1050 (another custom-made VFO), it worked without a hitch.

I think it's not so much the aspect ratio which is the issue, but the sheer number of pixels for the hardware to drive. Later graphics cards can naturally power higher resolutions. Of course, a lot depends on the native resolution of this ultrawide monitor in question...

GIJoe wrote: - it may be more silent than an octane (that's easy, really) but it will be like a really noisy PC

It can be easily fixed. My Fuel has a new PSU fan, new hard drive cage fans, and new graphics board fans. Basically the only fan I didn't change is the stonking huge 14cm one at the back. And now? It's as quiet as my PC.

Note of course that if you use older/hotter hard drives, live in a hot country, use a V12 etc. then you may need noisier fans with higher airflow. However, it's quite possible to make a Fuel much more silent than it is in stock configuration, without too much trouble. Personally, I found that the PSU fan was by FAR the loudest one in my Fuel. Replacing just that one with a modern and quieter fan made a huge difference, and the airflow out the back is still respectable and not concerningly warm.

My PC is almost silent when under no load, but when doing something intensive, the CPU fan does become audible (CPU is overclocked from 2.6GHz to 3.2GHz), although it's still pretty quiet. My Fuel on the other hand is also near silent, even after it's been running for an hour or two. You need to put your head under the desk to really hear it.

Of course, using very quiet hard drives also helps. Never underestimate the racket that some SCSI hard drives can produce.

Despite also having had a fan swap, and only having 3 fans in it in total (it's about 6 or 7 in the Fuel) my Indigo2 is a far noisier system.

That looks like a butchered CD drive eject mechanism?

ajw99uk wrote: Has anyone been in touch with serafina about this? I have been waiting over a week to hear back from him about the EISA card (which I bought but cannot get to work), just wondering if he's out of touch generally or with me in particular.

And if the EISA card is SNAFU, I might be tempted by a G160 if it is still available ...

Daft question, but have you installed the drivers for it? Also if it's one of the generic 3Com cards, they need a hacked driver which Ian has on his site.

Well, amongst thousands of other anecdotes, there is a whole section of programming stupidities here: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

I would really recommend you post a public hinv of it. An Octane of any type has at least some value, but you are leaving people to fish in the dark a bit regarding the RAM, graphics, XBow version, etc.

Do hope someone takes it off your hands!

I believe it should be possible to get the hinv via a console cable.

Alternatively, if you can simply confirm whether it's single/dual processor, the memory amount and graphics boards fitted it will be very helpful to people (and XBow version if you know it).

People are more likely to want to drive and pick it up if they know what they're getting

Nice little system! I've always loved the purple Indigo 2s. One of the more bomb-proof systems that SGI made.

Best of luck! I would ask the repair shop to let you know exactly what they did to resurrect it - assuming they manage to do so. It's always worth knowing this for future incidents.

Nice little machine, hope you enjoy it (once you get it fully running).

Well, I flew back from a training course the other day. The plane was a small 30 seater JetStream plane, and as you can see from the picture, there was a grand total of 1 passenger (ie, me).

Quite nice having your own personal jet and stewardess for a flight (who kindly took this picture). Also had a nice chat with the pilot too before we took off - he said it seemed rather daft to use the tannoy for one person, so just came and spoke to me direct. Definitely one of the more memorable and enjoyable flights I've had

I've always meant to give Mint a try at some point. It does have a reputation for being one of the cleaner, slicker and easier to use Linux flavours out there. But, it's also been quite some time since I've last played with a flavour of Linux. Let us know how you get on!

Of course, trying a couple of Live environments might be a good way of testing a few different distros out to see which one you like the look of best.

You're all doing fun things. I'm busy rebuilding my main PC's OS at the moment. It's long overdue for a rebuild (OS installation was 7 years old and increasingly flaky). What I wasn't counting on though was both of my 3TB arrays suffering major corruption issues. Managed to back them up to two spare drives and am now sitting in a fresh Windows environment with one array nuked and busy re-cloning from a backup.

Before I nuked the old OS, I decided to write down a list of the most essential apps that I needed to re-install (I hate always trying to do jobs and finding out that the required program isn't installed). List ended up with 40 programs on it

techknight wrote: I think SGI is a little bit too advanced for what I am willing to get into, and it doesnt appear its going to be an easy fix.

If you can connect it to a monitor which supports it (remember that these things were originally shipped with high-quality CRTs capable of pretty decent refresh rates), and get IRIX installed, you'll find that you don't need to be a total geek to use them. IRIX was one of the most user-friendly UNIX OSs around in the 90s.

My Windows tool of choice for popping ISOs onto bootable flash drives is Rufus . Never had an issue yet with it.

What SD cards are people using with these? Have you tried higher-performance ones to see if this helps? Or is it an inherent limit of the adapter?

It depends a lot on how good a drive they are, and how compatible they are with older SCSI buses. There are some excellent 36GB drives out there which are quiet and very fast - perfect as a system disk in an older Indigo2 for example. I run a 15k 36GB drive in my Indigo2 and Fuel - despite owning plenty of larger drives. Quite simply because with a big 300GB data drive alongside, I've been unable to fill them despite stuffing them with tons of programs, and they're almost silent as well.

Of course, if they're incompatible with older buses and noisy, then they're less useful. I had this recently with a mountain of 36GB drives I salvaged from our old AS400 at work. Some were lovely and quiet and worked great with my Indigo2, the others were noisy, clicky and only worked with my Fuel/O2. Guess which ones I claimed, and which ones I left in the bin-pile

R-ten-K wrote: $2K for an old IBM PC keyboard? The guy either has no contact with reality or is trying to launder money.

That's insane, especially since brand new keyboards with proper Cherry switches are still being made for around £130 or so. I bought one a couple of years back (Ducky Shine 3) and it's an awesome piece of kit.

I do like the Indiana Jones quote at the end of the description, quite fitting for an Indy

Now that would be an interesting one to try!

IRIX supports either displaying a list of the known users for you to select one, or providing a box for you to enter the username. If it's configured in the latter manner, no list of users is displayed.

Hence, the display of that login screen is fine and does not show that root doesn't exist or anything. You'd just need to type it in as the username.

Getting around a root password with IRIX isn't too difficult, but it does require a second disk with IRIX installed on it and the ability to mount both drives simultaneously. Check the wiki (and Google) and you'll find plenty of methods of resetting the root password.

As for that hinv, it is showing that there's one disk with SCSI ID 2 running on controller 0 (ie, the built-in SCSI bus). If you have two disks installed, then there will be two entries there showing the IDs of each (and possibly a third if you pop a CD drive in as well!).

jan-jaap wrote: Meat for yesterday's BBQ.

First of the season!

Pfft, 7 degrees and raining here in Scotland at the moment. BBQs are a distant dream right now...

Hi all,

I'm downsizing slightly by getting rid of 3 machines I have which are either never used these days, or are broken (and hence for parts only). My working O2, Indigo2 and Fuel are being kept incidentally

As these are low spec and/or broken, the two none-working ones are available for free. The working one can be yours for a minimal sum (make me an offer!) Only catch is you either have to pick them up from Aberdeen (UK), or pay for the shipping.

So, we have the following available...

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O2 R5000PC 180MHz (none-working, parts only, FREE!).

Skins are a bit scratched and are broken in a couple of places. There's a snapped piece missing at the rear, strap over the CD drive is broken, the lid is missing, PSU cover and CD drive covers are missing. The base is intact and in decent condition though. I obtained this as a broken spare when I received my working O2 many years back. Metal chassis looks to have been modded with the plate between the two hard drive modules removed. I was told this was done as a test to try and fit a 1 inch high hard drive many years back.

System comes with motherboard, PCI riser, the rarer but slow R5000PC 180MHz module (part number 030-1039-002), basic audio-only board. No RAM is fitted. The system does not power up when tested, so either the PSU or motherboard appears dead. No hard drive cages are included either.

If anyone wants the whole system for a few spares, it's yours for free. If there's no interest, I will be willing to part out some components if required, all for free (shipping costs only).









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2 x Indy R4600SC 133MHz, 24 bit graphics.

Skins are in decent condition. Nothing broken at all, just a few minor scratches on the top (and no black lids )

Both are Nidec PSUs. One is known as dead (died many years back, just won't power up). The other is fully working (and tested!).

Dead system has no RAM (pinched it for my Indigo 2), but the main board and CPU were working the last time I tested it. Comes with a 1GB hard drive with IRIX 6.5 installed (exact version unknown, but probably 6.5.20). System is available for FREE!

Working system has 128MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive (1" high, so sitting loose in the system at present - I do have a spare HDD caddy though for it). System boots up fine, root pw is known and provided, and it has IRIX 6.5.20 installed (base installation pretty much). I can throw in an IndyCam, and also have a keyboard and mouse for it as well if you want (early/chunky style, a bit yellowed). Dallas battery appears to be working OK at the moment (although it's the original one, so could die any time).

Please make me an offer for the working one. Of course, I'm not expecting much!






Indigo2 not included

All systems are "under offer" at present. Many thanks for all the PMs about these so far!

And that's all three systems now fully claimed.

Many thanks for all the offers I've had for them, and I'm glad they're all going to new homes

uunix wrote: Bit of porn.. bit of horror channel.. bit of moving 20 PC's to the new domain at work... APART FROM ONE!! ONE CLUSTER FSCK !! One cluster fsck who after multiple emails attaining to the said domain transfer to NOT turn their computer off on Friday the 13ths May.. TURNED HIS OFF!!! It would be nice that I had set up each PC to wake on lan.. but I never, and I have to go in tomorrow! MY fault for not thinking about people not doing as they are told.

Well, for this, he will at least suffer from remote shut downs at the worst time and I might even delete the occasional important file! (of cause I'd copy it to some location first and claim I saved his life... ) this from a guy that gave me 6.5 out of ten for a perfect cuppa just because the cup wasn't to the brim!.. GRRRRRR!!!

I found a few weeks back that you can never, ever trust people at work when it comes to simple matters like these.

We've been migrating from an ancient file server to a new storage solution recently. As the old server was severely ancient, very slow, and had 9TB on it, we decided to perform the migration in stages. We did a test migration first of everything and ran tests with some of the key users to ensure it worked, then we re-synced several folders and sent out a communication across the business clearly detailing that the migration was happening in stages, and listing a limited number of shares which had been moved.

So far, so good, and no complaints when we turned off the first batch of old shares. The following week, we migrated the second pile of folders across and sent the second communication out. Then, we received a worried e-mail from a user "a load of my files have disappeared". Turns out he ignored the part of out communication saying "this is a phased transition across several weeks", never bothered to check and see which shares had been migrated, and instead had decided to re-map *all* of his shares to the new server (the new server uses a root share with permissions to manage access to sub-folders, and his share had some permissions left over from the earlier testing phase).

Hence, when we'd re-synced the next batch of folders prior to the second stage of migrations, this had nuked all the stuff he'd been working on for the past week and was saving to the wrong place. Cue lots of scrabbling around with backups, lots of wasted time, and stern words from our regional IT leader to the guy about the importance of not making blind assumptions when it comes to company data.

I'm sure Ian could chip in as well. His packaging is similarly legendary. Ordered plenty of bits from him and all have arrived fully intact without a mark on them.

Not too bad actually. Apparently has 2 x 600MHz PIIIs and 1GB of RAM. Also, bidding starts quite sensibly. £75 is certainly a good price if you can get it, especially with an OS and disks included. Looks in good condition too!

Finally managed to catch the donation link whilst it was open.

Nice little system, very similar to mine! How much did you pay (if you don't mind me asking)?

Browser wise, the best one available is Firefox 3.0.19. Make sure you grab either the beta one, or one from diegel's share as the later compiled versions are faster and less buggy than the one in Nekoware "current". Don't expect miracles from it though, old SGIs aren't great at web browsing.

itsvince725 wrote: I suppose I'll have to get two disks then, the system disk currently in there is only 1GB.

I have found some drives on eBay of decent capacity for relatively low prices ($59 for a 73GB drive pre-loaded with IRIX 6.5.22 and some other software) but I'd like to get a second sled...

The Indigo2 can use 80pin SCA drives with an adapter. Hence how my system has 36GB and 300GB drives in it. Things to bear in mind though are that the adapters are a tight fit (put a strip of card between the adapter and the drive), and only some drives will work. Some drives don't support the necessary fallback to support the Indigo2's SCSI-2 bus. You won't harm anything to plug one in, but it simply won't be recognised. I'd say with the 30 or so drives I have that I've tested, I've had between a 40% to 50% success rate with them on my Indigo2 (ones that don't support it I reserve for my Fuel).

itsvince725 wrote: 4. How upgradeable is a teal Indigo2 like mine? I'd like to upgrade mine to a R4600 if it has a R4000 or R4400 (cost permitting, of course) because more power is always good, and I might want to upgrade the graphics system as well because I don't know what the specs of the current card are.

Welcome to the Indigo2 club!

Bear in mind that a higher number doesn't automatically make it better. The R4600 was a derivative that was more geared towards Integer applications (it's good at these, but its FPU performance is weaker), plus the only speed it was released for in the Indigo2 was 133MHz, whereas the R4400 went up to 250MHz (these are a bit more pricey as they're still used by some medical scanners and the likes).

AFAIK, sleds are required. I know someone on Neko did look at hooking a drive directly up to the backplane port, but I'm not sure if they had any success. A 68pin drive should work, but 80pin SCA drives are probably the most common ones I've seen and can be picked up pretty cheaply.

jan-jaap wrote: The only gotcha is the SCA adapter: the solder side of the adapter easily makes a short circuit with te metal of the disk. That's why you can see some carton there.

I had the exact same experience. When I bought my system from Ian, he'd applied gaffer tape to the back of the adapter, but it wasn't enough. Cue my Indigo2 randomly shutting down here and there. I ran it with the lid off and saw occasional sparks from the adapter as it shorted due to the pins poking through the tape. Sliding a piece of cardboard between the drive and the adapter fixed it.

From the fold mark, I'd say it's those square sheets you get in public bathrooms. They'd fit OK.

It's difficult to say. Old PSUs can misbehave in many ways.

My Indigo2 is on its second PSU. Originally, I had an issue a couple of times with the system randomly powering off after a few hours of use. I also had an issue whereby it would sporadically not boot at all (fans powered up, but no LEDs at all), turning it off at the wall for 30 seconds then back on sometimes resulted in it booting.

After changing the PSU, it's been running fine for the last 18 months.

Not saying the PSU is at fault for sure in your case, but they don't always just go bang and smell of burning electronics

Agreed. If that fails, R4400 CPUs are usually not expensive - at least up to 200MHz, so buying one of these is also worth a punt. Even if your current CPU is OK, it's still a potential upgrade. The only real issue is if the motherboard has failed.