The collected works of katzmandu

I'm a sucker. I saved a few systems from a dumpster/scrapper.

1) A Sun E10K. I know what do with that; I used to work for Sun and my job was deploying them.

2) An Encore MultiMax. Looks interesting, and I have docs for it.

3) An SGI Onyx? Challenge? Test Rack. This is what's interesting and where I need your help.

The system is a full Onyx-like rack, but I was told its "guts" were Challenge-like. There seems to be a VME backplane that opens on both ends, a few empty disk trays, and finally a very sexy IO board which includes multiple Sirius video in/out, FDDI, "Etherplex" (never heard of that) serial, and other goodies. Attached are photos.

What kind of power does it take?

This is the only power input I've found. I'm not familiar with it.

Thanks. If it takes 3-phase I think we're out of luck. I may be able to do 240V in my garage for a short period of time. I only have a 120V feed out there, but that can be made into a 240V feed pretty easily for a short period of time.

I think I can take the monitor and keyboard off my Indigo and hook it up to the main console ports of this and get information that way, too.

Also, I'm in Indianapolis, IN.

I think I can just setup a "240V" circuit with two hot 120V legs and one neutral leg, but I'm not 100% sure. This is how most 240V appliances work in the USA (ovens, clothes driers, etc.) I did it once before for a Sun disk array 12 years ago, but my memory is fuzzy.

I think it's "normal" and NOT 3-phase, based on the connector. Let me double-check.

Here's the MultiMax, since I figure you're curious. It was certainly an odd lot, that's for sure.

For scale, here's a pic of the "SGI Test Rack" (As it is appropriately labelled) next to the E10K.

I have to find my Irix media. Actually, I'm waiting on a friend. I sent it to him years ago, and now that I need it he needs to send it back I can use the external CD from my Indigo. It came to me with no disks, but I have scores of SCA disks in the basement, and an SCA to 50-pin converter, so I should be good there.

That is a good call!

Both drive cages up front are fed by red cables. They both seem to be connected to the same board, one is labelled SE SCSI and the other DE SCSI. I don't know if I trust the labels, though.

OK, so my labeling matches that layout, with the SE on top and HVD low, but both are using the scary red cables that preach "danger" to connect to the disk cages. I just need to trace through the right one, and probably use a Sharpie to label the drawers. Also, pulling the board out a few inches and verifying doesn't seem like a bad idea. It's not as notorious or as fragile as the centerplane on the E10K.

HP, 24"... works on my O2 just fine.

OK, a few notes.

First, the power connector is a 330B6W which is not the same as an IP44. D'oh! I ordered an IP44 off of e-bay and it didn't fit.

Secondly, I went to hardwire it; I figure for testing it shouldn't be too bad. I hooked a 120V feed to the X & Y poles and my neutral/ground to the ground pole. I threw the breaker on the front and nadda.

Then I noticed on the front there are 3 power supplies. Well, slots for 3 power supplies, but I only have two. Will this Onyx-ish rack run with only two? Given I have no drives in the disk trays, and the 2nd VME cage disconnected, It shouldn't draw too much power while I run 'hinv -t' from the PROM (that's my goal for today.) Any ideas?

I re-wired my house and garage so now I have 220V going to my garage. This wasn't that hard to do, but it also makes my life easier if I ever want to put a nice air compressor or other tools out there. Plus I now have 20A service to some things instead of 15A, but that's another story.

With the right power hooked up, the system starts, but doesn't run.

On my first attempt, I got a POKA Error. There was one VME board with the red light, and that was the "main" system board with all the ribbon cables (don't know the p/n) but the system also has additional system boards with ribbon cables to other IO/break-out boards. After some STFA I saw that if you get a POKA, and have a board with a red light, pull the board, try again, etc. I tried again after pulling it and get a "-12VDC under voltage"

I'm thinking something is up with the power supply(s) and I may need some new caps or relays or something. Once that's fixed I'm betting the POKA will go away with the one system board and I'm good to go. Does anyone else have experience which jives with my hypothesis? Are there common errors with the power supplies and other threads showing how to fix them? (I haven't STFA on the "-12VDC under voltage" yet.)

The firmware gives a date of 1995 and revision of 3.2(?) [ I should have taken a picture. ]

The clock has also kept good time. The logs show the last time booted was 2005, and it showed today as being 7/13/2013. No idea how that worked, especially when I have dead NVRAM batteries on my Sun systems that are half the age of this (I figure this system is circa 1992; I have sun equipment circa 2000 with dead batteries!)

Thanks for the link.

My IO4 board has a VCAM, 030-0500, and per the docs, and the LEDs the issue is with voltage regulation on the VCAM. So, I've pulled the VCAM.

Now, no more POKA error, but I still have -12VDC Under Voltage.

The, I realized that my IO4 board (where it was plugged in) had no connection on the backplane for the VCAM, which may explain the funky behavior.

Moving the IO4 with the VCAM re-installed to the appropriate slot, it seems much happier.

Now what? It's kind of hanging here..



And now it just sort of hangs. Monitor/LCD on the front says "Startup Complete."

Which board has the bad CPU? I assume I should pull that, try again and see what it gets me.

It's that simple.

The issue is I had a serial console connected, and I figured, that like a Sun, it would see "oh, no keyboard, I'm a serial console, look at me" and let me get to the boot prom. No such luck. I hooked up an LCD and SGI keyboard and we're in business. Here are some pictures

Thanks everyone for the help. I have some drive trays and drives to put things together on the SE bus. I figure an 18G SCSI drive should be more than enough for a basic install of IRIX 6.5.3 (latest I have) which should be more than sufficient for the machine.

The system currently lives in the garage, so no air conditioning, lots of dirt, 90+ degree temps, etc. I ran it just long enough to see what it had then shut it down.

As the Indiana Computer Museum comes together, it will be running, hopefully close to 24/7

It's an O2; of course I named it Erwin.

Howdy once again.

My "Challenge XL" came to me with a few disk trays for the drive trays that came with my "franken-rack."

Once the weather gets cooler I want to install/play with this thing, so I'm lining up drives to go into it. I'm looking for documentation on the trays; essentially what do the jumpers do, and why do we have two 50 pin connectors in them, which one I should use, how I should handle termination, etc.

Per everyone's advice I have the LVD cable disconnected and am only going to run one tray at SE. I don't think the

I have a few different trays, too. They all have the same back, but one is missing the front and doesn't have the SCSI-ID change-o-matic number selector. I'm assuming I can throw a CD-ROM in that for local booting. I'm going to have to dig out a 50-pin to 68 pin adapter for my other drives (or 50 to 58 to 80, as I have a lot of SCA stuff.)

Any advice or guides you can throw my way?

Thanks!

This is exactly what I was looking for. The different drive sleds I have all had different jumper configurations. I've reset them to SE-A, HVD-B (even though HVD is disconnected at the IO4 card.)

The goal is to maybe get an OS installed tonight depending upon weather. I have IRIX 6.5.3 (Foundation & Overlays) ready to go. It got my O2 working, so now it's time on this, while it gets cooler outside.

Now that I have time to work on it, it won't boot. Stuck at "Initing saio" ... after some RTFM and STFA it looks like a memory error. Going back to what I saw over the serial console from the last few times I've tried to get it to boot:

*** Disabling CPU 10/01 Error: Failed scache1 addr test.

Which slot is that? They aren't labelled. I assume the 01 is for Card Cage 01 (the front) and processor 10 would be either 10 or 11 (if we start counting at 0 or 1.)

The "Initing saio..." readout on the management display comes out as:

B+__+++++++++++++D

I think I know which board to pull, as it's "blinken lights" don't match the patterns of any other boards. I went ahead and pulled it, and now no more "D" for disabled CPUs. Still hanging at "Initing saio..."

B+__++++++++++++

Any clues for further decoding?

I think I have that part figured out. After pulling the board with the bad CPU and moving another board around (trying to debug) I now have

"Initing saio..." B++++++++++++

... but still hanging.

I broke out my serial console gear (USB->serial converter, some null modem cables, etc.)

... and then it boots fine. Are you kidding me? UGH! Intermittent faults are the worst!

And then it reboots again after not finding a boot device and gives me this:



Which slot does this physically translate to?

The only thing I see as "slot 2" (at least in card cage 1) is a 030-0318-004

Counting backwards (right to left) I pulled the card out of "slot 02" and tried again.



So that board didn't have the bad RAM.

Also, after pulling that board I saw the following error, which I hadn't seen before:



Then, after complaining there is no boot device I pressed enter to continue and got this...



OY!

So then I move over to the other card cage and pull the only thing I could think of as "slot 2" which is a combined CPU/memory board.



Very frustrating.

Also, I don't know how many of you are getting annoyed by the updates or not, but I figure I'd keep everyone posted. jan-jaap, everyone, you've been fantastic resources and inspiration.

I swapped around some cards; I pulled the CPU board which had a bad CPU (last night.) I pulled one of the IO4 cards originally and wound up swapping that one with the existing one (this one is -05, the other was -03 hand-written), moving the graphics adapter over to the newer IO4 and removing some of the extra mezz cards (one had a SCSI card, the other had a remote VCAM card which wasn't used.) I also pulled out the extra Sirius board, since I don't have a break-out box for it. I also pulled an audio card which was hard to get to and buried pretty far back. It's an interesting beast, as it has a VME adapter to the audio card itself which plugs in via two plugs to the adapter. Even with that it sits back very far in the cage and you can't reach it (and nothing was hooked to it.) I'll pull part numbers later.

After all this, things started working more reliably. Even though I have some bad ram that the PROM maps out with the POST the system will reboot on its own a few times (like when it can't find a boot disk) and get back to the PROM menu and work; it wasn't doing that consistently before.

I figured why not try and install an OS if things are more stable? I have a CD set of IRIX 6.5.3 and a ton of drives.

Booting from the CD to run fx and partition the disk (I tried 3 different disks) works fine.

Booting from the CD to copy the miniroot over to the disk works.

Booting from the miniroot fails (see attached photo.)

Not sure what all the errors mean, and if they're valid given that the situation seems "compounded" (SCSI error, then IO, then VCAM, etc.)

I tried playing with terminator jumpers, parity jumpers, etc, but none of that made a difference.

Where do I go from here?

Next major step will be using the 'pod' tool from the PROM to isolate the bad 64M of RAM and yank it, but I didn't get that far.

The system came to me with 4 disk sleds; all 50 pin.

My disks are 68 pin and SCA; but they have jumpers to "force SE mode" on the disk that I've set. But that could be the issue.

What gets me is that labeling the disks, running fx, copying the miniroot is A-OK. It just barfs on booting the miniroot.

Yes, the haul I have is from Pat which was posted on sunhelp.

I took the 50 pin drive out of an Indigo2 and threw it into the Onyx. It worked like a champ. I didn't install over it, because I want to keep 5.3 on it for the Indigo2.

I also pulled the resistors from the RM4 board. No more errors from that.

Bottom line, I need a 68-pin tray for the Onyx.

I took some photos of the other boards; if useful, they can be added to the wiki, etc.

0) OLS for Challenge/Onyx. One of mine just got crispy

1) a 68-pin drive sled for an SGI Onyx/Challenge series SCSI cage/tray. All I gots are 50 pin.

2) SGI O2 CD-ROM or DVD. The one I have is fubar, and it's just not the gear thing.

3) SGI Granite keyboard & mouse x2 (one for the Indigo2, one for the O2)

4) SGI Beige keyboard & mouse (the ones where the mouse plug into the keyboard.) I have one, which I have to split between the Indigo and the Challenge/Onyx rack.

4) SGI O2 RAM.

5) SGI O2 Camera

6) SGI O2 Drive Sled

7) SGI Indigo2 drive sleds.

I'm in Indianapolis, IN 46219 (USA.)

Thank you!