The collected works of leaknoil - Page 2

That helps a lot. Thanks. The way people charge for parts like those if I can't find them in the shop there is little point of grabbing the rest. Its odd every single power supply was removed from them too. Although nothing in surplus land makes much sense.

tjsgifan wrote:

leaknoil wrote: I found a stack of 350's at a electronics surplus place but, all the power supplies were removed. More stuff may be removed but, if I can't find the power supplies no point in going further. They may be somewhere around but, I am not sure what to look for. The line drawings around are not specific enough to stand out in shelves full of power supplies.

Anyone able to provide a picture of one removed from the system or better than me finding one on Google ?

Sorry I have a feeling I bought all those power supplys from the seller - I didn't want the Altix systems as I have loads already, just wanted the PSU's for upgrade purposes and shipping 8 PSU's was far cheaper than 8 Altix systems.

Hah it was you. The guy told me a guy in the UK bought them all when I asked about them. It's funny when he said that I immediately thought it had to be someone who is on nekochan. Anyone dedicated enough to SGI gear to ship a bunch of power supplies across the globe had to be on nekochan.

kramlq wrote: They were fairly popular in academia. The platform hardware was relatively simple, and well documented (ftp links to the official docs are available here for anyone curious: http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/DECstation ). And DEC didn't make it too difficult for Universities to get official Ultrix source code access. So it featured in a lot of OS research/development, networking (e.g. network stack research), OS benchmarking, and open source OS porting projects. The original MIT Exokernel was developed for the DECstation; it was also a major platform for CMU Mach, and even used for early Windows NT MIPS work.

They were fairly popular in mining and related fields for some reason. Back when they would show up in surplus places they usually had a asset sticker from a mining related company, mining related school program, or government agency that dealt with mining.

So, I dug thru the pile and found the compute module with the io board and such. I didn't think it was there and of course it was the very last one on the bottom. I went ahead and bought it and one of the cpu/ram versions. I bought a power supply off ebay and it came today. I was playing with it and realized the internal scsi cable is MIA. I guess I could use external scsi devices but, that's a pain. Anyone know where I might find a cable ? It looks like a 68pin external scsi connector to a 68pin drive style connector but, I understand it carries IDE for the cdrom drive too. No idea how that works.

Ahh I see now. Two separate cables. The IDE one is easy but, a cable that goes from 68pin external to 68pin internal style is going to be difficult. Especially a short round flexible one. Never mind. I just looked again and it is the same as the internal connector just metal with latches. I thought it was the wide external type.

Power cable is already to the backplane so, I'm ok there. I guess I should be good to go now. Is the console port standard DB9 serial 9600 8N1 ?

I've got it rigged with generic pc cables atm. Seems to work ok and about the only way I can do it as I don't have the panel portion that interfaces the IDE cable to the laptop style cdrom drive. I just have the scsi backplane portion. Not going to be able to have a internal optical drive.

What's the OS of choice for these ? Just a generic IA64 linux distro or is there one that's customized for these ?

OK so, next problem. I was testing ram in the thing and one came up bad. The system disabled 4gb out of 12. I replaced the bad simm and it passes all the tests but, the system is still disabling the 4gb. I suspect I need to tell it to enable it now but, the console is so cryptic I haven't been able to figure it out.

Anyone know how to tell it to enable all the ram again ?

EFI Boot Manager ver 1.02 [12.38]

Partition 0: Enabled Disabled
CBricks 1 Nodes 1 0
RBricks 0 CPUs 2 0
IOBricks 1 Mem(GB) 8 4

My 350 node has a really old prom version and I can't boot anything. I read through a couple threads on here that had links to the shub1snprom.bin file I need for the update but, the threads are very old and the links are very dead.

Anyone have another link to it ?

smj wrote: Until somebody chimes in with better info -- have you gotten hold of any of the Pro Pack sets for Altix? Just a guess, but maybe they included firmware along with the graphics drivers/libs and other goodies.

I just have the hardware and downloaded SUSE IA64 images. I found a torrent for propack 5 on some Russian site but, 5 is pretty old. It may not help much.

I hate making another thread about this beast but, this question was actually buried in the power supply thread and it never really got answered.

How do you change the memory configuration on a 350 ? Like going from 1gb simm to 512mb simm. I've gone through all the manuals I could find but, there doesn't seem to be any mention of how to do it. I can't see anything in the L1 controller that could do it and you can't boot to EFI if the memory all fails obviously. All these 350's had similar memory in them when I looked. A mix of 1gb and 512mb simm. All the ram I am using came out of them.

I understand the bank layout so it isn't that. If I put 4 1gb simm in bank 0 it boots fine. If I put 4 512mb simm in bank 0 it spits out all sorts of errors. It looks it still thinks they are 1gb and doesn't automatically detect what size simm are installed.

Here's a bit of the errors it gives when trying a bank of 512mb. It just repeats the same sort of message for every simm installed:

MAIN MEMORY ERROR:
************************************************

Address: 8000003000000000
Location: 001c01#0
Subtest: Base + Walk/Inv

Expected: aa55aa55aa55aa55,aa55aa55aa55aa55
Actual: 55aa55aa55aa55aa,55aa55aa55aa55aa
Difference: ffffffffffffffff,ffffffffffffffff

Suspect DIMM: DIMM0 N0_L_BUS_X
Bit Mask 0x3cff00003cff0fff,0x3cff00003cff0fff

Suspect DIMM: DIMM0 N0_R_BUS_X
Bit Mask 0xc300ffffc300f000,0xc300ffffc300f000
************************************************

BetXen wrote:
Are you sure that your specific RAM modules work properly and are not damaged ?
Good luck.

I am pretty sure they are ok and compatible. They were installed in the Altix boxes. I have 24 of them and it would be hard to imagine all 24 being bad. When they were in the 350's the systems were a mixed combination of banks of 1gb simm and banks of 512mb simm.

When you added simm were they all 1gb simm by chance ? I haven't had any trouble changing banks of them other when I had a bad one and the Altix shut off the bank it was in permanently. I never did learn how to re-enable the bank and ended up using a different cpu board. I think it is a command in the POD part of EFI. I can find no information at all about POD commands.

Seems to me what I need is a Altix 350 service or hardware manual. The user guide seems to have been written at the grade school level. It has bright pretty colorful pictures but, not a lot of details.

jan-jaap wrote: If the scrap value of an Onyx2 is > $300 then there must be more gold in my computer systems than in my wife's jewelry box

Not a chance that is worth $300 in scrap. Maybe $30. He used too many zeros. I have been offered Onyx like that for $50 from actual big recyclers in the past. They know exactly what it is worth in scrap. The labor involved scrapping stuff like this quickly kills the profit margin. If you;ve ever taken an Onyx completely apart you know it's not a ten minute job.

My last SGI box found a new home awhile ago but, I just found a bag of spare ram from my SGI owning days. I have no way to test any of it anymore. It's been in a bag in a closet for many years now. There is a bit more octane ram then in the picture.

(6) O2 sticks. I think they are all 32mb.
(6) Origin Sticks 030-0782 128? mb
(20) Octane sticks. Most are 64mb simm I think but, a few are larger.

How about $20 + $5.00 for a USPS flat rate padded envelope. I can ship it internationally but, you'll have to get with me for shipping costs.

***Looks to be sold****

This is a SGI labeled DDS2 4/8gb Tape Drive. Pretty standard stuff. Works with anything a standard non-SGI version would. The SGI rom lets you record and play back AudioDAT tapes which nobody probably uses anymore. 99% of DAT drives didn't for copyright reasons. I've used this on a PC with a SCSI card to extract old music recordings off AudioDAT without problems. I have extracted the one Audio DAT I had so, it needs a new home.

The drive is in great shape but, the front door flap is missing or was never there. I got it without it. Not sure SGI had flaps or not. I ran a cleaning tape through it and did a 2gb dump and restore to test it. No issues at all.

$20 including shipping in the US. I'll ship it outside the US but, you get to pay the shipping. I am sure it will be more than I am asking for the drive.

Nothing to do with this but, I can't believe nekochan isn't all over this. It's got no bids !!11111!!! Probably just stolen from the Janitor's closet door who happened to be named Bob as well.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SGI-Silicon-Gra ... 1403920924

Ok.OK. Don't yell at me too badly for this but, I don't really know where else to post this as it is a strange, odd, and supposedly worth 300 euro CDROM drive from a Playstation 1 development system. I know Nekochan is one of the last holdouts for those that love the odd and strange so, here it is. Maybe there is some SGI to Playstation 1 development link I hadn't heard about. The site that does deal with this stuff directly ASSEMBLERGames won't let me post it there unless I've been a member for 3 months and I'm not doing eBay yet. That site claims they go for 300 euro all the time. We'll I am in California and Euros do little for me so, how about $200 with free shipping ? Uses an odd connector on the back. Whatever cable this usually comes with I don't have.

I apologize for interrupting your normally SGI related forum browsing. Please return to browsing ads for free Octanes located half way around the world from you now.

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pentium wrote: I've never understood the crazy demand for people collecting devkits.

Sure there's enough software and hardware floating around now that you can mess about and possibly crank out an unofficial game or two but the money these people (not you) who already have like four PS2 TOOLs or multiple N64 devkits is nuts given how all they seem to do is lug them around and braaaaaag.
In related news, Assember reminds me of Amibay and BetaArchive. Sure it's a lot of knowledgeable people but man is the community an ego trip. As much as they might be a reliable source of info I warn you that there might be a touch of price biasing.

You are not wrong at all. Don't go near lifehacker or your brain may melt.

A long time ago I picked up this card at a surplus place. From what I gather it is called a DVS Centaurus or sometimes a IRIS 1.1card. It looked like it might be a high end PC video editing/capture card so I took a gamble of buying it. Technically it sort of is but, not anything used in PC/Apple desktop stuff as far as I ever found. It seems to be a high HD-SDI capture card made for different markets but, used mainly in hard core surveillance and monitoring systems.

I did, however, find mention that it was used in Smoke and Flame systems. It is a PCI-X card so, SGI could be possible. Anyone seen one of these in a Flame system ?

Ah thanks. This does look like it would be a DM12 since this has HD-SDI written all over it. Funny how in all my googling, way back when, Nekochan never hit when all the words I was searching for were right there in the Wiki. This http://www.creativemac.com/article/SGI- ... stem-34519 has a lot of info on it actually. Sounds like it was for the Prism and had Linux drivers.

I am unlikely to ever get my hands on a Prism although I'd like to. I sold off the last of my HD-SDI gear long ago when I got out of video production anyway. Is there someone here that needs this ? As long as it didn't involve me spending any money on shipping I'd swap this for about anything more fun then a PCI-X card that sits in a drawer. Mind you no idea if this works or not. Looks pretty though.

These aren't totally rare on ebay. I have seen a few. They just never say what it actually was from or did. They just list the words on the card and carry on like that one. I think they sold a lot more of these in security and manufacturing stuff than post production gear. Probably being found in those systems. Must have been some nice looking camera footage of whatever it was.
I only ran into the Smoke mention by chance. I've never found a SGI mention until now. In talking with another user it's not even clear the SGI side of things ever came to anything much more than a press release.