The collected works of jan-jaap - Page 3

I've got an O300 in a rack in the lab at work. We don't have a dedicated server room and the noise level was driving people crazy. So I decided to replace the fans. The original chassis fans are NMB Minebea 3110KL-04W-B79 and run at a fixed speed of > 4000 RPM. Sound pressure is 40dB a piece. There are four chassis fans plus one in the PSU.

The problem is that the L1 has a lower warning limit of 2160RPM, and most silent fans are below that. I opted for Scythe / NMB 3110KL-04W-B39-E51 fans running at 2700RPM (28dB a piece): http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/acc/0 ... etail.html

Replacing the chassis fans was easy, the PSU fan was more of a problem because the entire thing had to be disassembled. Inside was a crappy delta fan, is was so poorly balanced you could feel the fan shake if you spun it.

Here's what the L1 has to say now:

Success, and much more quiet! Oh, we don't have air conditioning either so this is a normal temperature.

It looks like SGI had the same idea. In Neko's O350 the fans run at 2300 RPM, with the same 2160RPM warning limit.

Same here (Netherlands): I can access the site from home, but not from work. Different, but both reputable, Dutch providers.

Well, I guess I shouldn't be browsing auction sites in the bosses' time, but this sort of sh*t doesn't encourage me to sell stuff through eBid ...

The openssh.sw.server subsystem is not installed by default.

kammedo wrote: As far as my knowledge goes, it is supported up to IRIX 6.1. But im not 100% sure about that.

IRIX 6.1 was only for R8000 Power Challenge/Onyx and Power Indigo2. IRIX 6.2 was an all-platform release again.

deBug wrote: I was mighty interested in this but chickened out due to the gfx err message.

Hah, wait 'till you see this: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0270475112
Two Tezro's, in Sweden, for $1000.

deBug wrote: Dam you jan-jaap. You just ruined my day!

Now, if I had told you 'nanana, look what I picked up under your noses' but I wouldn't have minded this one myself. Sell off system number too, keep one free Tezro!

deBug wrote: The location is in driving distance from me. I cant for the life understand how I could have missed that one.
Probably not listed for very long as hamei said.

Looks like a regular auction to me:

The buyer is adjusting his bid, probably afraid to be sniped in the last second. The seller however, is from Sweden, has zero feedback and posted to Ebay US (or at least that's where I found this one). I can imagine some people's hesitation to bid on it, and Mr. Roberto T. got lucky.

anotherlin wrote: Ok, I've wrote a small C program to extract a file.

There's a program named 'midb' that does exactly this, but works for older IRIX releases. I think I dug it up as a shar file from the comp.sys.sgi archives, but who knows ...

I'd like to reverse engineer the product descriptor file once, then I could write my own gendist. This is relevant for pre-IRIX5.3 systems, for which this utility was never released.

JacquesT wrote: Would the Dallas chip also hold the System MAC address?

Nope. Not for an Onyx

Damn! I've got a 10x/40x Pioneer slot loading scsi DVD-ROM in the attic. Need to try this myself

Congratulations, that's a nice setup!

hirudin wrote:

Code: Select all

Memory at Module 001c07/Slot 0: 1024 MB (enabled)
Memory at Module 001c10/Slot 0: 3072 MB (enabled)
Memory at Module 001c13/Slot 0: 2048 MB (enabled)


You might want to distribute the memory evenly over the nodes, though.

Received a Fuel from SGI for development work. I didn't expect to find a *blue* system in the box with 'Asterix prototype' stickers on it.

The power LED is blue -- nice touch

hinv -mv

Yes, it arrived with half the memory and the environmental monitoring disabled. Thanks guys

/usr/gfx/gfxinfo -v

/usr/sbin/l1cmd version

It must use this ancient version because newer PROM images expect something from the PSU that it doesn't provide -- and then the whole system doesn't start!

/usr/sbin/l1cmd env

/usr/sbin/l1cmd serial all

/usr/sbin/l1cmd pci

hamei wrote: Just paw the ground three times for yes, once for no.

Did you feel one? Sorry to disappoint you, this one is for a different project.

anotherlin wrote: Can you tell us what's all about, unless it's top secret ?

I don't think my employer (or SGI) would appreciate. But I'll see if I can take some more pictures with my new Nikon D90 and a tripod.

Those skins are solid blue plastic, not a paint job or something ugly like that. I guess it's the Fuel equivalent of the transparent O2, that's why I mentioned it in this forum.

sybrfreq wrote: 500mhz with a v10... whats so + about it? Besides, it would be x86 nowadays.

This is not a prototype of an upcoming MIPS workstation, it's a Fuel prototype so it's from 2001 or so.
What makes it special are the looks of course. It also has a couple of connectors on the mainboard you won't find in a regular Fuel .

He, a Tezro in NL

Where does it come from? Most Tezros were Discreet stations but this one doesn't have the usual digital media or fibre channel options.

I want a Tezro

LionSGI wrote: i have v6.150 now, it was 6.31 before... any ideas?

Looks good to me. Do a 'hinv -mv' and near the end you should have a line that looks like:

PROM v6.156 is the latest, and I think it was already in IRIX 6.5.22 (my runs 6.5.30)

So, I dug it up. Mine is a Pioneer DVD-305S, a SCSI 10x/40x DVD-ROM in the usual form factor with a 50pin scsi connector. I set the 512byte blocksize jumper.

I attached it to an Indy running IRIX 6.2. The Indy will boot from an original IRIX CD just fine (I didn't try audio).

IRIX reports:

But, and this is where it gets interesting: it also boots IRIX DVDs . Yes, and that's no a typo!

First, I used a PC with Nero to burn a 'dd' image of an IRIX 5.3 CD to a DVD. This boots just fine, just a lot quicker than you're used to from 'Indy vintage' external CD-ROMs

Encouraged by this initial success, I added a second (4.5GB) disk to my PowerIndigo2 and 'dd'-ed the first IRIX 6.2 CD onto it. I then used fx to grow the partition to the size of the actual harddisk, changed the partition type back to 'sysv' (?) and used growfs to grow the EFS filesystem. Next, I copied the second IRIX 6.2 CD into this filesystem, unmounted it and 'dd'-ed the entire harddisk to my server where I burned it to a DVD.

This boots too!

IRIX reports:

As far as IRIX is concerned, this is just a very large CD-ROM. And it seems it doesn't care, as long as the device utilizes a 512byte block size. Somehow, this was to be expected since you can perform similar hacks using a harddisk.

I am quite excited. Imagine an entire IRIX distro including all patches etc. on one or two DVDs. I've only used systems and software from well before the DVD was invented so this hack is completely transparent

Oh, there are some thing that don't work:
* UFS. This would require modifications to IRIX. Think of this as a large EFS CD-ROM
* DVD video. Ditto.
* You may need IRIX 6.2 to make one, I believe IRIX 6.5 has read-only EFS support
* My PowerSeries doesn't want to boot from the Pioneer, either from a CD or DVD. I tried with the 4D/440VGX which has PROMs that are new enough that they recognize a CDROM (doesn't need those 'I'm a harddisk' hacks).
* I didn't try dual layer DVD, and I don't even know if the Pioneer supports them. There's an upper limit of 8GB to EFS filesystems.

Have fun

Arabski wrote: Cheetah, 15 kRPM. Quietest drive I've ever heard, or did not hear in fact

Confirmed, but use the 15K.3 or newer. Those are the ones with the quiet FD bearings.

I'm afraid it goes a little beyond environmental monitoring. Remember that blue Fuel prototype I've got here? It's got old L1 firmware. I don't really care, but it was complaining about it at startup so I thought I'd fix that. Did that, and it was dead .

Hooked up an L1 serial cable, got L1 prompt (phew!), did 'pwr up' and, I kid you not, it said something along the lines of "No suitable power supply found".

I rebooted the L1 in the alternative flash bank and everything worked again. Lesson learned: there's some sort of ID in the PSU to identify it to the L1 via i2c or similar and without it you get nothing. You need a real Fuel PSU.

dexter1 wrote: Our Fresh new baby boy (well, a month old already)! He goes by the name "Storm" and he is a big dude. We welcomed him the 18th of December last year. Doctors had to perform a Cesaerean, but Fem seems to recover fine. Click on the picture to check the album.

Hey, congratulations to you and your new family

dexter1 wrote: Ah well, covered in diapers leaves me not much to do anything regarding SGI's, though i have managed to revive my Indigo2 with another PSU.

Ah, don't worry about it. Our son David was born October 20th last year so I've been there, done that First two months you're too dead to think of anything, after that things return more of less to normal. It's pretty amazing how everything is different, even though of us are still the same. Lately I have more time in the evenings again for my hobby. Even got myself a new Onyx2. After all, kids are supposed to go to bed at some point

Here's David:

dexter1 wrote: Unfortunately, personally my health is not 100%. I'm suffering from short Migraine attacks since early november and after substantial medication i am going to see a specialist soon, i hope

Sorry to hear about that, man. Hope you can get that under control.

__attribute__((something)) is a GCC extension, that has to go or #defined away

If you want to make sure that struct is packed, have a look at the MIPSpro pragma guide (?).

Does anybody have any experience with the Miranda mini converters, e.g. SDI <-> composite or SDI <-> component? I guess I should avoid composite. SDI <-> AVC would be awesome, but probably expensive.

I've got SDI I/O on a couple of systems, but no decks, players or monitor that can handle it. But I have SDI I/O on the old 4D/380VGX Predator rack these days. It has a VideoLab with 601 (parallel) video I/O and I added some Miranda parallel <-> serial converters to that. A PowerSeries with SDI video, how cool is that

Wait a second -- you said only one of the two channels was external. Did you hack a flatcable into the case or find different Adaptec?

I'm not too fond of the Atlas series either. We used to have Quantum Atlas disks at work -- they all died and were replaced within warranty, many of them more than once. I had a Maxtor Atlas in my O2 -- too noisy. I bought it new, btw.

IMHO the biggest problem with most UW SCSI drives is that by now they're all at least 5 years old. A 5 year old disk that was used occasionally may be fine, but one that has been spinning in an array for 5 years: forget it. Bearings wear out and get noisy.

The FD bearings are more quiet and more durable, so I feel more confident to buy them second hand.

eMGee wrote:

sgtprobe wrote: Oh, I do hope you are wrong, because Ian Mapleson is building a Fuel with just that spec for me right now. hehe

That's odd, maybe Ian could enlighten us a bit on this? I've never heard of 2GB O3K DIMMs. ( If they exist, I wonder if the limits could be overridden...)

I think someone here is confused between a 2GB memory kit and a 2GB DIMM . Memory has to be installed in pairs (kits).

canavan wrote: If you really think you have to adjust the serial number or anything else, you should fix the checksum as well. The checksum is called RV and besides the checksum istself, it is apparently used to pad the VPD to 96 bytes, so that you'll have to adjust the length of the RV field as well if you delete or add anything. The checksum itself is in the first payload byte, i.e. the second byte after RV, the first being the length. The checksum does not cover the clear text name of the device (e.g. "SGI Gigabit Ethernet Controller"), but everything after that, including the RV itself. The sum of all the bytes covered modulo 256 should be 0x00. I've used the shell code below to compute the checksum over the hexdump, this time just hex bytes with one space, no linebreaks etc.

Good stuff, thanks!