Nekonomicon - foetz

foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 5, 2016, 11:54 p.m...

robespierre wrote: Thanks foetz, I knew you would supply lots of details in this area

pleasure is all mine

one more thing to consider is that with late sgis the differences in speed are not that noticeable anymore. owners of machines with an r16000 in particular but running the same stuff on older ones might be a surprise in some cases i.e. one program suddenly behaves like a dead horse while the other still reacts properly. for example the workflow of wavefront on an r4400 indigo2 is way faster than maya on an r10000 o2.
a funny exception is softimage (the original one, not xsi of course). there the floating windows are always somewhat juddery no matter what machine you have

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Raptor Talos POWER8 Workstation at Feb. 6, 2016, 3:10 p.m...

ClassicHasClass wrote: Anyway, I think we're fundamentally disagreed on this point, but I hope enough orders come in for them to do a production run. I'm actually budgeting for two.

hehe yeah seems so but either way i do hope that takes off as well of course. getting back some variety to the hardware maket is crucial since monocultures are always bad in many ways

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 7, 2016, 11:44 a.m...

vishnu wrote: who wouldn't want one? Oh wait, every member here who can't stand more than 50 decibels of fan hum...

and don't forget the electricity counters :lol:

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Onyx2 RM10 dead? at Feb. 7, 2016, 2:56 p.m...

video always is a little tricky. what other devices are you using with it?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 8, 2016, 12:11 a.m...

GIJoe wrote: getting an sgi nowadays makes no sense beyond collecting them.

reading some threads here should teach you otherwise

hardware this old is not reliable anymore. you better not bet the farm on this stuff to keep trucking along

quite the opposite in my experience. my sgis run; outlived all other stuff i had in between. the cheap x86 junk in particular.
also hardware quality in general went down the drain in recent years. everything got much cheaper and that comes with a price (pun intended

)

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 8, 2016, 12:01 p.m...

jan-jaap wrote: The old hardware may have been constructed with a longer service life in mind than the current "cheap x86 junk", I doubt it was designed for an expected lifetime of 15 ~ 20years, the age of the average Indigo2/Octane today. Even the best elcos have a limited lifespan before they can expected to fail. The same for mechanical bits, fans, disks etc.

Also, while reliability of current hardware may be limited by the relentless pressure to keep prices down, the reliability of SGI hardware was often limited by the fact they were pushing the technological limits. Already back then the RMs of Onyxes would fail, and you were crazy to let the service contract expire if you depended on the machine. But people accepted it because the Onyx could do things no other system could. IIRC the entire first run of R10K CPUs was replaced, and the R8K wasn't all that reliable either. I think they even gave free upgrades to R10K to some customers.

of course they're not immortal. yet as mentioned as far as my stuff is concerned so far it has proven to be significantly more reliable than commodity stuff. to underline that, this very post is sent through the proxy running on my server-octane which has a 4gb system disk from 1998.

IAMNOTDEFECTIVE wrote: I should consider getting the Fuel if I want less sound emitting from the unit (as well as to not have it dramatise the electricity bills )

unfortunately, thinking of what's been posted here over the years, the fuel seems to be quite a troublesome machine in comparison to other sgi models.
however you have to decide what you actually want. if noise and power comsumption are major factors for you then an sgi or any other "real" workstation (or even bigger) is just not the right thing for you.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Archiving CDROM images at Feb. 8, 2016, 4:39 p.m...

for the osx users, if you don't wanna use dd, exporting a bin/cue from toast worked fine for me

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 8, 2016, 5:21 p.m...

uunix wrote: The Fuel is a 1x800Mhz R16000 with 4GB Ram V10 Vs The Octane2 2x600MHz R14000 with 4GB Ram V12..

Source, a 700 frame maya project of a rocket (unfinished and un-moving).

Fuel
Total time For Render 00:10:51

Octane2
Total time For Render 00:09:13

a dual 600 just about 10% faster than a single 800? there's something wrong

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Legitimately obtain / pay for IRIX 6.2 installation media? at Feb. 8, 2016, 8:19 p.m...

did you just check the supportfolio downloads or did you actually ask sgi?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Maya behaving strange at Feb. 12, 2016, 3:11 p.m...

backface culling activated by accident?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Should I take the dive? at Feb. 14, 2016, 6:10 p.m...

i could never relate to all the fuzz about noise. these things are real machines and those you usually hear; some might even say it's expected. same as if you would complain about a lamborghini being too loud

foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of MaXX is back! at Feb. 15, 2016, 10:04 p.m...

can you see what kind of attack it is?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of What pointless thing are you doing right now? at Feb. 18, 2016, 11:50 p.m...

i watched it and it was just as pointless as bsg :lol:

actually i'm not sure why i watched it after bsg wasn't my thing at all. guess i'm an optimist

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Need to get out this digital on-line world.. at Feb. 20, 2016, 2:50 a.m...

uunix wrote: We believe your email address and password set was on that list.

they 'believe"? did the email match or not?
looks like you rather have to worry about security because of them instead some alleged leak

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Irix 6.5.22 desktop icons delay at Feb. 21, 2016, 10:35 p.m...

check your dns. is that correct?
for further tuning you can also slim down your indetd.conf

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Irix 6.5.22 desktop icons delay at Feb. 22, 2016, 4:56 p.m...

marmotta wrote: at shutdown and login show me the annoying message of service disabled. No way for fix or completely remove esp?

what matters is whether it's running or not. as long as it's not running the messages don't matter

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Email from SGI Support at Feb. 23, 2016, 6:36 p.m...

foetz wrote: i checked the new pages and couldn't find any remains of the irix stuff.

it happened. they pulled the plug.
can anyone still find some irix docs?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Solaris Studio 12.5 anti-spy at Feb. 24, 2016, 7:02 p.m...

unfortunately oracle jumped on the "we don't give a crap about our user's privacy" bandwagon. the Solaris Studio 12.5 docs say:

The Usage Data to Oracle feature periodically sends information on your usage of Oracle Solaris Studio components to Oracle Corporation. This information is used by Oracle Corporation to improve future Oracle Solaris Studio software releases. This information is anonymous and cannot be associated to any individual or organization.

However, if you wish to disable Usage Data to Oracle, set the SUNW_NO_UPDATE_NOTIFY environment variable to any value other than zero (0).

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E60778_01/ht ... #scrolltoc

obviously the last sentence is what matters so make sure you have that set.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of AIX 1.3 at Feb. 25, 2016, 5:09 p.m...

f10d4 wrote: I suggest moving all this here: viewforum.php?f=30

indeed

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Installed 6.5.22m, but uname -R still returns previous version. at Feb. 26, 2016, 6:56 p.m...

i assume you did apply patch 5084 in advance?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Whuhuuuah! at Feb. 27, 2016, 11:10 a.m...

particularly convincing if you're not running windows :lol:

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of [Review] Alias PowerAnimator v6 at Feb. 28, 2016, 2:38 a.m...

fantastic, much thanks for that link!
by far the most comprehensive material i've seen so far

foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of pdp7-unix at Feb. 28, 2016, 11:45 p.m...

there's a project trying to create a pdp-7 based on scanned assembly documents. maybe that's interesting for some of you

https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Installed 6.5.22m, but uname -R still returns previous version. at Feb. 29, 2016, 9:10 p.m...

dexter1 wrote: Apparently an /etc/autoconfig -f will kick the system into making a new kernel which suits your current hardware configuration.

not what he needs. he had a unix.install already which is the result of autoconfig so all what's needed was putting the new kernel in place as correctly pointed out by hamei

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of New wiki entry, image processing on O2s at March 5, 2016, 1:07 p.m...

oh how nice, thanks :-)

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Best IRIX version for O2 (and others) for today. at March 5, 2016, 1:17 p.m...

rosmaniac wrote: has anyone set up a development environment without using the IRIX Dev Foundation

that won't work. even for gcc or whatever other compiler you need the basic dev stuff for the os which would be the dev cds except for the actual mipspro.

the GCC suite is well-tested, if not as optimized.

it's neither as recent tests from some guys here including myself have shown. if you have a mipspro stick to that.

if I want to do general things and not 'IRIX-y' things like pulling audio from DAT, is the latest OpenBSD, but that's not IRIX.....

no point in running something on an sgi that runs way better on x86. that aside with anything but irix you can run nothing that was made for irix which is the very point of an sgi ... you get the point, without irix an sgi is just an old box.

as for your actual question, with an o2 you can only choose between 6.3 and 6.5.x so unless there's something special you have that requires 6.3 the answer is quite obvious

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Best IRIX version for O2 (and others) for today. at March 5, 2016, 3:07 p.m...

rosmaniac wrote: First, I appreciate the response, and all that you have done for the community here over the years.

oh thanks

But I see here that building Nekoware packages at least needs 7.4?

there's no rule as for which version you have to have for compiling stuff as long as it works for you.

Is that just GCC for IRIX, or GCC in general?

i meant for irix but gcc in general has never been a blast. it just was the only free one for quite some time and unfortunately the only option on some systems.

It seems the consensus of previous threads was that 6.5.21 was the one to have, with .22 a close second.

in my experience 21 was the fastest and as mentioned by jose already was the last one shipping with certain things so it's a very good choice.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Hello Nekochan, new Indigo2 owner.... at March 6, 2016, 8:23 a.m...

welcome natocccp and congrats. you got yourself a true classic there :-)

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Would it be a good idea to pick up an SGI for programming? at March 8, 2016, 12:05 a.m...

that totally depends on your expectations and/or needs but given the prices these days make sure you get an indigo2 because the indy really is slow

anyhow keep in mind that as far as linux goes you cannot compare that to linux x86 in any way. neither in terms of compatibility nor when it comes to available software.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Microsoft to release SQL server for Irix at March 9, 2016, 2:28 a.m...

dexter1 wrote: Of all the systems in the top 500 HPC clusters, 488 run Linux, 10 run Unix, one mixed OS and one windows SGI has supplied 29 systems and is 4th in the list of hardware providers. They still do something reasonably well...

the top500 are quite pointless because they make no difference between clusters and actual single machines. so you could just plug 4000000000000 ipads together and rule it despite not having anything hpc at all.
some years ago there was a separate cluster list for a short while but it didn't last long ... and i guess it's not hard to guess why

that said, sgi do well given what's available. comparable to when they actually developed their own stuff? not at all.

as for the actual topic, from microsoft's perspective i'm actually surprised that they've waited for so long but i guess it's not so easy to admit that they just don't matter in the server market.
whether having that db for linux is an actual gain - i don't know but given that all databases have a linux version i'm not sure it's gonna be a success.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Microsoft to release SQL server for Irix at March 10, 2016, 4:06 p.m...

R-ten-K wrote: HPC != single system image.

not what i meant at all. i meant a system designed for professional use.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of CF, featuring write-protection at March 15, 2016, 1:30 p.m...

i wouldn't use flash based devices for important backups at all. in my experience as far as reliability goes they haven't been great at all

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of {SOLD} Octane2 Available in UK at March 16, 2016, 7:46 a.m...

what's he running on the first photo?

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of (SOLD) Onyx4 2x1Ghz /8g /143g /V12 /audio /DVD at March 18, 2016, 2:21 p.m...

this is a neat mod for sure. if i didn't have something similar i'd grab one

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of (SOLD) Onyx4 2x1Ghz /8g /143g /V12 /audio /DVD at March 18, 2016, 10:06 p.m...

as much as i like hamei's rants i cannot confirm the o350 related ones. mine has always been fine even when i had some quite unordinary mods applied

this is the best irix machine you can get and this particular one is even more special due to the onyx4 case.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Onyx350 4x800/4g/v12 w/ teardown at March 19, 2016, 4:52 p.m...

that's great info. thanks for posting :-)

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Can´t get IRIX 6.5.22 to install on Indigo R4400 at March 20, 2016, 1:34 p.m...

depending on what you wanna use 6.5.x doesn't make much sense on an indigo because whatever is available for 6.5.x only will likely not run very well there.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Can´t get IRIX 6.5.22 to install on Indigo R4400 at March 20, 2016, 10:37 p.m...

FlasBurn wrote: wanted to try OpenBSD/NetBSD anyway.

oh that's not what i meant at all but an older irix version.

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of (SOLD) Onyx4 2x1Ghz /8g /143g /V12 /audio /DVD at March 21, 2016, 11:22 a.m...

necron2600 wrote: how much louder is this system compared to an Octane

not louder at all.

Higher pitched noises or lower pitched?

higher. anyway you can control the fan speed. i have mine at 1450 and it's quite harmless that way while not causing heat problems

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foetz
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Who joined April 14, 2003, 4:34 a.m.

Wrote on the subject of Onyx350 4x800/4g/v12 w/ teardown at March 23, 2016, 1:24 p.m...

spiroyster wrote: I have no MIPS cluster experience with SGI (only workstations)

that was one of the major advantages of these systems: no clusters. the big mips irons ran as one single system. just like a very big workstation.

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The collected works of foetz - Page 38