The collected works of kev009

pipeline wrote: Look at your ethernet and TR cards very carefully. 100 mbit cards are fairly uncommon, and they can go for quite a lot of money on e-bay. (Conversely, 10 and 4/16 cards aren't worth a bent nickel.)


Not very rare for the two I know in existence.

The Olicom 10/100 card is the only one that works in PS/2s (and definitely not AIX 1.3). The card is an ISA chipset bridged to MCA, and most PS/2 users aren't very fond of it. For this reason, people might have one just to have it, but the performance difference over the high-end 10 mbit cards is marginal and comes with high CPU usage.

On the other hand, there is the 9-K for RS/6000 machines. This is a PCI chipset bridged to MCA. It is fantastic in RS/6000 machines, and most PS/2 users don't purchase them because a driver and ADF has never been written for the PS/2.
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Check sig for my RS/6000 collection. I also had a 7043-140 (43p) and 7044-270 (44p) since passed on. MCA RS/6k are the only boxes I actively search for.

At one point I had a ton of PS/2s: 11 8595 and 9595, a 9576 Lacuna, PC Server 720 (6x Pentium SMP microchannel/PCI), and all sorts of accessories for them. They are now in the hands of another Comp.Sys.Ibm.Ps2.Hardware member, though I do wish I kept the P/390 to throw in an RS/6000.

I use various System x/xSeries at home and work for different purposes.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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If you only see boot messages but no login on serial, it means either the machine isn't running getty on that serial line or it doesn't like your console cable. You need a fully wired laplink cable for it to be happy.

A workaround is to put the box into service mode, boot from an AIX CD, and go through the menus to get a maintenance shell on the box. Launch 'smit', configure the network adapter, set it for 'now and reboot', and reboot. Now, you should be able to telnet/rlogin in and continue on with setup.

Edit:
Added to my pages here for future reference: http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/rs6000/serialconsole.html

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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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Not totally uncommon, but they fetch a ridiculous price (as do all UNIX portables) when they show up on eBay. I can point you in the right directions if you really want to purchase one.

The first was actually the beige -N40 that use MCA internally, ran a special version of AIX 3.2 (I have this CD if anyone needs help), and was somewhat similar to the PS/2 -L40 portable. Tadpole was involved in its creation, the same company that did the Precsion and Sparc books.

Dig around on my IBM site and you can find information about all these, including pictures on an 860 running Linux.

_________________
SGI Fuel
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T42, xSeries rack servers, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
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http://csiph.com/gallery/v/Users/kev009/AIX/

Doing various weird things on an old Microchannel box 8-) Lots of fun.

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SGI Fuel
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T42, xSeries rack servers, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz

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eMGee wrote:
Luckily IRIX was never big on Java, unlike how Solaris (9+) and AIX are. (Even with Java-based system administration and maintenance tools...)


Just about any admin can be done through smit (Motif) or smitty (curses) and has corresponding commands that are displayed while running so you can learn the stuff you need to do pretty quickly. The WebSM java stuff looks a little bit less intimidating but it isn't at all necessary to use. If you have a Power3 or up, I don't think it would be particularly slow though. It doesn't need to be purposefully avoided, but smitty in a local term or ssh session is hard to beat.

_________________
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T42, xSeries rack servers, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz

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IBM has been dominating silicon since the introduction of POWER1 other than a few brief slips. Remember, IBM has a sizable foundry operations and alliances that its competitors could never match. It also has research labs that have driven much of the industry.

It's a bit sad that they never did POWER6 or POWER7 workstations for us collectors to look for in a few years :-) .

Since CATIA is more of the PLM/MCAD variety of CAD I doubt it is very demanding on the 3d GPU pipeline.

_________________
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T42, xSeries rack servers, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz

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AIX 5.3 will run on PReP, but it is getting quite close to its official end of life.

NetBSD has very good PReP support if you need a maintained free OS.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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GeneratriX wrote: Should we ask to one of the Moderators to move the whole SOG relevant sub-thread to The Octane Hardware Aggregator or anything else? I know, it was my fault to ask here! :) Sorry, khalidschofield! :oops:


Add this link to wherever it is moved to:
http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/sog/
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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eMGee wrote: I'd say the qualitative spirit of IBM died somewhere in the 1970s, since then they've been not much worse or better than M$ in my book.

Blasphemy! Kill him with fire! :P

But seriously, POWER has blown everything away for a long time now. SPARC and Itanium aren't even competitive in performance. If you absolutely need the fastest systems money can buy, IBM delivers. Just because it doesn't get featured in movies doesn't mean it isn't an interesting platform. AIX is a solid operating system, albeit it is probably only intended as part of a DB2, WebSphere, or Oracle stack more so than for general use these days (with the exception of government HPC). It still does have some interesting features such as HACMP and hot patching the kernel. PowerVM is the real kicker. IBM has a long lead on virtualization. Mix and match AIX, Linux, and 'i' depending on what needs and legacy apps you need to support. Also, the xlC compiler is top notch.

In general, I find IBM gear nice to work with once you've learned the tricks. It may lack some of the personality of SGI, but I've never found quality lacking in the high end IBM gear. Sure, the PC biz went south after the PS/2, and there were a couple mediocre RS/6000s like the 43p but that was also a sub-$5k workstation. Modern X servers are pretty nice IMHO - I place IBM and HP on level ground at the top of the heap.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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eMGee wrote: Oh sure, at a gazillion gigahertz, with tons of cache memories and slurping power, elegant like a super-charged old-timer. (In other words: Let's just not compare instructions per watt, that would be rather painful.)

I find claims such as the above similar to what x86/-64 freaks love to boast, about their ‘bigger, better’ Linux ‘super computers.’


I'm not sure where you're going here or what prejudice you base this on. Clock speed and cache size are major contributors to execution speed. These processors also have 12 functional units, including a vector unit, for very wide superscalar execution. They've dialed up everything that makes up a CPU to the max. What else do you want? Oracle's recent 30 million tpcM submission to the TPC required a cluster with 108 CPU packages. IBM's 10 million tpcM entry had only 24 in a single frame. Your power usage claim is baseless.

Read up on the design of POWER4 though POWER7. It's a LOT more than raw clock speed. Frank Soltis's ("father" of the AS/400) book "Fortress Rochester" has some good insight on the move to POWER4, which unified the Integer RS64 with the Floating Point POWER3. Both of these were "brainiac" processors with many functional units, short pipelines, and low clock speeds. The POWER4 was their first clock speedy processor at the expense of a longer pipeline but these are easier to design and every other CPU maker had been and still is building these so they are easier to market.

Calling POWER7 a "super-charged old timer" is silly. POWER has significantly influenced or introduced: RISC, superscalar architecture, SMT/"hyperthreading", multpackage, multicore, hardware virtualization, eDRAM. IBM wins because they are a tier-1 silicon manufacturer and the techniques used in their design have consistently been borrowed by other manufactures and the lower end.

To each their own.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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I've been writing a http://minecraft.net server in C since the official Java bloated one chokes on 30 players and uses gigs of RAM.

I've been regularly building it on my Fuel to get compiler feedback from MIPSPro, make sure it works on Big Endian gear, and make sure I don't stray too far from POSIX.1-2001.

There's a lot to do but you can grab the source off of github and there's enough implemented to log players in and let them walk around. http://mc.kev009.com/craftd/

I contributed Irix build fixes for libevent-2.0 upstream, so 2.0.9 is sufficient to build with using something like this:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --with-zlib=/usr/nekoware/ ax_cv_c_float_words_bigendian=yes

Stay tuned :D
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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pentium wrote: Ooh. This isn't the fancy graphical client I would want to see running but to tout that you are running a minecraft server on something like an SGI would be explicitly cool.
I wonder waht kind of fancy optimizations we could come up with.


The basis of the project is libevent, which in turn uses the Irix /dev/poll functionality that appeared in 6.5.15 and makes servicing a large number of clients much faster. I posted a couple weeks ago that my fixes for libevent 2.0 got accepted, so this is available to any apps that make use of it.

Beyond that, I'm trying to stick to POSIX.1-2001 so it runs well on all platforms and can't think of anything in Irix that would explicitly worthy of conditional code. Set phasers to stun.. er, set compilers to optimize and be done with it :P .

All said, an OpenGL client could easily be done in C or C++ that would work fine on older boxes unlike the bloated official Java one.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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Hi,

Just got a Sunblade 2500 silver and a V445. OBP is down level for both systems. Is it available anywhere other than Oracle's paywall?

The 2500 has an interesting video card, a Tritec DG2-64-1: http://tritec.de/index.php?id=0031&idsu ... aphiccards
It's radeon based and similar to the XVR-100 but has dual DVI. As far as I can tell, it doesn't work as an OpenBoot screen though. I'm not terribly experienced with Sun gear so I'm not sure if it has to be enabled or what. Any hope?

Any recent efforts to get the XVR-600 or XVR-1200 supported in xorg? Otherwise I guess I'll be grabbing an XVR-100, the intent is to run Solaris 11 or OpenIndiana on the 2500.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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yetanother**ixuser wrote:
chatuser wrote:
I think the "industry" is killing its own propietary hardware and software using these "practices".


i could not care less about, since before all the open source zealots creeped out of their sh*tholes and expected everything for free, it was well known practice that one have to pay for support.


That's a very poor predicate.

On the contrary, people have been very conditioned to abysmal quality in software and even firmware. Patches are due diligence by the manufacturer to correct their original negligence. There's no basis whatsoever for additional charges for patch access. I can't believe you are defending paying for bugs. Constructing a paywall to corrections of negligence is unethical. Patches aren't "support", they are admissions of error to the original contract. You get your money ethically on upgrades or real support (i.e. phone time, case engineer assignment, consulting, etc).

But I guess even mighty IBM no more believes in it. Sad :( . IBM was for the longest while the exception. If you had the gear, you're in the clear. You could phone up and get AIX for a $50 media charge.

These antics are precisely why businesses have moved to Linux in droves and the commercial UNIX space is a small niche for large corporations that have big enough necks to not get strangled. What they inadvertently do is hurt small and medium businesses that placed trust in the vendor and don't want to be pissed on time and again just to have to pay more money to get what they originally thought they purchased. They also hurt communities like this one that add value to platforms at no cost (for example the best Firefox build on AIX is done by a hobbyist).

_________________
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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PymbleSoftware wrote:
Vinum wrote:
Hi everyone,

Kind of slightly strange question for you: could anyone suggest me a sort of guide on Sun Solaris proprietary software? Yup, I'm already aware of Blastwave.org, Sunfreeware site et cetera, but keyword is 'proprietary' — is there a way to eye-embrace online most of Solaris shareware range?

Any link? Any hint? Any clue?



Proprietry means commercial. Just a reminder....

At the top of the page it is wrote:
Forum rules

Any posts concerning pirated software or offering to buy/sell/trade commercial software are subject to removal.


For commercial packages, it depends on what you are looking for. I worked on extensions to "Risk Vision" which was run on an SUN e25000 for Basel compliance for managing banks spread of risk. I suspect that is not what you are interested in. The list of commercial software for Solaris is as long as you arm.

I have no idea what you mean by eye-embrace and normally people just choose one or the other software repo like blastwave, CSW, etc..and stick with what is in that.

R.


There's such a list of IRIX ISV products on this site so I doubt it's against the rules. If you wanted to run stuff from repos like blastware or nekoware, you'd get a much better experience from something like FreeBSD or Linux on your system or even PC anyway.

Guessing the poster wants to know what the machines were "really" used for. Sure, plenty of people bought Suns to run a Emacs and a compiler.. FOSS and UNIX have long been close to one in the same and now mostly are. But a lot of the workstation boom was about single task engineering computers. Think products like CATIA.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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guardian452 wrote:
Seems like sun was commonly used with heavy-duty EDA tools. anybody have an example of such software (i.e. screenshot) they could share? I've never needed anything more than Eagle...


Ah yes.. stupid me, I worked in this industry :lol: . Cadence was definitely big on Sun. We had an Ultra 5 with IC 5.x for compatibility testing. The CEO of our company was in charge of methodologies at Motorola at the turn of the millennium and always claimed to me he was the catalyst for moving the EDA industry to Linux :lol: . Tangential, man that kind of propriety software sucks. The atrocities these people put out.. funky shell scripts, environment vars, weird ass installers, directory structures, core dumps... *shudder*. Typical license costs might be around $100k for the honor of enduring all that.

Here's an off topic. My IBM RS/6000 7012-397 ($80k desktop with 1GB RAM) came out of Intel on a skid of about 30 other RS/6000 workstations. I speculated the only need would've been EDA but it's pretty damn ironic to me? I think Intel was in bed with HP by the time these came to market though so it seems like a pretty big competitor order.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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PymbleSoftware wrote:
kev009 wrote:
There's such a list of IRIX ISV products on this site so I doubt it's against the rules.


No, but the OP was "aware" of blastwave, etc and talking about "shareware", which if you never saw shareware (Commander Keen, etc) you might associate with sharing and the whole confusion about "proprietary"... Best to cut it off at the pass before the moderators have to get involved.

R.


I think we're all aware of the rules, and the OP definitely should be now so lets leave it at that. It's an interesting topic for war stories if we could try and pinpoint interesting proprietary software.

_________________
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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What's funny is that a couple of interns could easily whip the UX into shape and bundle some more modern BSD stuff and provide a decent shell experience.

I remember seeing a while back IBM had some kind of Eclipse(rational) connector where you'd develop on Windows and it would save/build/run on the POWER box. I guess that's their solution.. use Windows as a head end :roll:

Solaris 10 and 11 are the only commercial *NIX that don't feel arcane to me without a custom env.

_________________
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IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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porter wrote:
kev009 wrote:
What's funny is that a couple of interns could easily whip the UX into shape and bundle some more modern BSD stuff and provide a decent shell experience.


Those same interns would also attempt to improve "loadsa stuff" and in term break many mission critical applications that have been running for the last 20 years.

Yup, I reckon those interns could leave their mark.

For every spotty intern who moans about not using zsh or git I'll point to ten people getting real work done.


Things apparently break anyway without improving the UX (AIX 5.2 WPARs as a "feature"...)

I hardly see how a decent shell profile and some commands will cause full system meltdown. Throw any conflicts into /usr/bsd/ or /usr/gnu and let the user choose if they need something weird for software that went beyond standards in the first place. My AIX machines are all outfitted nicely and it doesn't hamper the base system.

And yeah, nobody does real work with BSD and it always breaks. zsh and git will hose your system if installed and have no productivity merits :roll:

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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porter wrote:
kev009 wrote:
zsh and git will hose your system if installed and have no productivity merits :roll:


What pisses me off is kids who write shell scripts and add "#!/bin/zsh" at the top and claim they are being hyperproductive because of it, and instead have made a script that then won't work on the target systems because, funnily enough they didn't have and previously didn't need zsh until the spotty erk decided that they could override the change control of an organisation.

Similar with GIT, just because you use GIT on your favourite FOSS project does not mean you have to force it onto every server you see, having a distributed system that works well using SVN is not magically improved by breaking everything to satisfy your GIT evangelism.


That's a symptom of other failures. Being shiny new feature guy isn't any better than being stuck in the past. Shell scripts should try damn hard to stick to POSIX for obvious reasons, but zsh is fine as an interactive shell. Standards rule for the backend, but frontends can have some sugar.

While I use git on my own projects, SVN maps better to the 40-hour-week-programmer and especially managers. That said, I have yet to see a large project where git bisect wouldn't have been useful at some point. The mature programmer will note things like this when doing tool selection. For example, if I am enthusiastic about git, I can use it with an SVN repo without affecting the organization. If I identify a large inefficiency where git may solve problems (i.e. lots of remote employees), only then is it worth presenting for a a tough migration.

But we're getting a bit off thread topic.. the stuff I'm calling for is mundane. Decent TTY/termcap handling, bump to nvi or include vim in addition to the SysV vi, tab completion by default, shell history, add a useful prompt, etc. If these changes break things, the department (IBM or ISV, wherever the breakage is) need to reevaluate themselves for competence.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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Visually it has a boat load of RAM sticks inside and a cage I think, right?

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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zahal wrote:
During the weekend I tried to mount the P5 drives on a linux box, without success (gparted had jfs support).
Disklabel was unrecognized.
Is there a way to mount AIX hard drives on any other platform/os?


Not that I'm aware of. The JFS/JFS2 implementations in AIX differ from the Linux JFS implementation which has roots in OS/2 rather than AIX. AIX also uses LVM (different from Linux's LVM naturally) since AIX 3.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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If you dig around http://ps-2.kev009.com/ enough you can fill in the holes but it stops around P6 era.

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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What would a ballpark price be for one of these? + shipping to the US :?

Winnili wrote:
Digital (Equipment Corporation) Personal WorkStation 500au , or DEC PWS 500au (for short)
  • 500 MHz 21164A/EV56 processor (socketed);
  • 1½ Gbytes ECC RAM;
  • DEC (DE500?) 10/100BASE-TX ethernet NIC on-board;
  • DEC DE450 NIC with AUI, Coax and UTP (PCI);
  • PowerStorm 3D30 (TGA2, SN-PBXGB-AA, PCI);
  • DEC KZPBA (QLogic ISP1020) SCSI HBA on-board;
  • DEC KZPBA SCSI HBA (PCI add-on);
  • Ensoniq ES1888 audio on-board;
  • Cypress USB controller on-board;
  • latest SRM loaded for it, V7.2-1 (2000).

Instead of the PowerStorm 3D30, I alternatively also have a PowerStorm 3D10T (ELSA GLoria Synergy, PBXGK-BB). No disks, although I may arrange one or two (contact me for more details). There are two of these systems available, with the above specifications and options, are available. (One of the systems may have a failing NVRAM battery, but it's fortunately a standard ‘miniature cell’ type.) I also cleaned the systems thoroughly recently. The systems work fine with VMS V8.4, to name something.

As far as trading goes: I'd be prepared to trade a system, or maybe two, for SGI systems and parts of interest.

[Update 11-OCT-2012: Changed the formatting.]

_________________
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
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Any idea what is happening to other pieces of gear?
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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If you hunt around on ps-2.kev009.com in RSINFO you may be able to find what you need on the RAM.

You should be able to get it booting an easily available version of AIX like 4.3.3. You may be able to find the FRU for the serial dongles in RSINFO, I've seen them on ebay in the past.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

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I would assume there is some proprietary stuff, either connectors or bus protocol, that give this adapter control over power/keyboard/video/mouse of the x86 xserver. It must run an RTOS or cut down Linux depending on age that serve up the HTTP and IPMI capabilities. It's basically a single board computer.. a computer in your computer the same way IPMI and other OOB systems are. If that sounds scary, it is.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
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Hi,

I am trying to build out a "full" gbrick rack. I am looking for 6 more Origin 300s or 8 Origin 350s. I'm located in the Southwest USA and can drive quite a ways for the right haul.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
http://www.kev009.com/ - Blog
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Ubuntu 16.04 worked as easy as x86 on my P6 p520, granted I am booting under VIOS which may make things easier. I am working to fix FreeBSD ppc64 right now for VIOS and eventually PAPR as a hobby project. I'm using some spare work hours to bring FreeBSD to P8 PowerNV as it may be commercially relevant with Xeon E5 stagnating on I/O and memory bandwidth.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
http://www.kev009.com/ - Blog
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I'm still looking for now up to 5 O300s or up to 8 350s.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
http://www.kev009.com/ - Blog
Free Usenet access for comp.* heirarchy. Send me a message for posting access.
Mopar got me hooked up, well tested and pleasant to deal with as always.
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
http://www.kev009.com/ - Blog
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If you're in the US I might be interested in the PCI shoebox
SGI Fuel, Indy R5k
IBM RS/6000 7006-42T, 7011-250, 7012-397, 7012-G40 (upgraded to 4x 200MHz PPC), ThinkPad 710TE vintage tablet, ThinkPad T400, various System X, NetVista 2800
Sun Ultra 27 Xeon Quad Core 3.20GHz, Sunblade 2500 Silver, SunFire V445
HP c8000

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/ - IBM Retro
http://www.kev009.com/ - Blog
Free Usenet access for comp.* heirarchy. Send me a message for posting access.