The collected works of mia - Page 2

RageX wrote: The Fuel has, supposedly, an ATX MOB (not quite?) ... but you'll need to get the hacksaw out to accommodate the graphics card? The Fuel puts the graphics at the bottom of the case, it's not part of the AGP/PCI/PCI-Express card cage area ...

I'm guessing your budget is small but have you considered a custom case? We built a custom rack mount case for a customer and the tooling and sheet metal charges were only a few thousand; the Engineering time was a lot more $$$ ;) . The injection molding is another story ... $$$


I've considered the graphics card, and I believe it might just work, some chassis work might be required but I'm confident this could be a "go". We'll know as soon as I receive the case. I've measured the mobo and this might just work.

I intend not to spend more than a few hundreds on this deal, simply because there's no need for it, it either works or it doesn't. If I was going to follow the custom case road (I thought about it) I'd rather go buy a Tezro or Origin 2k/Onyx^2. And quite honestly, a 600Mhz Octane2 is roughly $600, therefore, therefore why would I spend more than a few hundred bucks on a Fuel mod?

This is entirely an "amateur" case mod, don't expect anything shiny, but I intend to try, and I believe this is the most important thing. Also, and that's an important thing (at least for me) I bought a large case to reduce the overall noise, I intend to chose the fans carefully in that regard. I've also considered server cases, but I've decided not to go this way either as most of them are usually very noisy.

I've always considered that the original Fuel case was of mediocre quality, especially compared to the Octane 2. In that regard I do like the Octane 2 better than the fuel, unfortunately, the Octane 2 has limited number of drives and/or no possibility to handle a SATA drive and a CD/DVD reader, which is a showstopper to my project. The number of Octane 2 pci slots is also limited to 3 (4 for the Fuel), while this is not a major concern, this is a little plus.

I certainly hope that the case I've just bought will do the job, I would imagine I will receive it in about a week from today, which gives me enough time to think about the cooling part and other things.


Mia
:Onyx2:
schleusel wrote:
mia wrote: While I will be waiting for this new case, I plan to study the cooling part. I intend to replace the original heatsinks, I have not yet decided if this will go water cooling or air cooling.


Keep the environmental monitoring of the L1 controller in mind here..

You'll have to resemble the original cooling quite precisely (i.e. 6 fans with certain minimum rpm - see the list in the fuel hardware aggregator thread: http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9046 ) or you'll have to disable the monitoring if you want the machine to stay powered on for longer than 60 seconds ;-)


I thought about this, I'm studying hard the cooling part now. Water cooling is not excluded, but I think I might simply replace the heatsinks with something with more punch.


Mia
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gcmandarine wrote: Hi there,

Does anyone need a Sgi Fuel Case ?
I have two or three empty cases with front Bezel available for sale.
For europe only !

Guillaume


I'm afraid the shipping costs themselves would be higher than buying a used fuel here, in the US. But thanks for the offer, I just bought a 500Mhz fuel with a v10, 1GB ram, 18GB HD on craigslist for $100; not the best deal in the world considering it's "only" a 500Mhz but I needed some parts for my fuel surgery.


Mia
:Onyx2:
loonvf wrote: Yesterday I went to another Nekochan member to test the Fuel motherboard.
He has a working Fuel that's why.
So I connected his PSU to the motherboard only (no CPU or memory) and we connected a PC running hyperterm via a serial nullmodem cable to the internal L1 connector.

However only a few characters came out but we were not able to get the PSU running anyway (most likely we used the wrong switch as we learned). Anyway, we then assembled his Fuel again and connected that Fuel internal L1 to the PC but also there was no usefull output visible. 19200/8/1/no we used all the time.
Then we deceided to use the serial on the back of the Fuel and finally we got output running at 9600/8/1/no. That gave good output on the terminal.
But using these settings on the interal L1 did not work either.

Does anyone have any idea what cable, serial settings and terminal settings the L1 controller needs, both the internal and external connector?


This is indeed a really good find, the L1 would be super useful for the application I'm looking to port or simply to use the Fuel as a server.
I've never really looked at it, but I assume L1 gives you temperatures and allows you to bounce/stop/start the fuel, correct?

Mia
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regan_russell wrote: Correct.

Hooking a null modem serial cable 8N1 speed is 38400 for Origin if i recall, 9600 for some other SGI systems.
You should get a text menu or a login: prompt.
Hitting Control and T, should get you into L1.
There should be a command set on techpubs.sgi.com for L1..
I type help and figure out the commands from there for my L1 and L2.
From memory, stuff I have typed lately in L1 include "env" and "power down" to show environment settings and I recall fan speeds and temperatures... Sorry I hope this makes sense... really really tired..

Hope this helps,

Regan


Most importantly, can we power up the machine thru L1? (yes this involves that L1 is active all the time). It's my understanding that L1 is available even in the case that the machine is down, correct?

Thanks,
Mia
:Onyx2:
Sorry to ask again, but I just can't figure this out, how can I turn a fuel on, remotely, assuming it's off to start with, and I have access to "L1 diag", network and serial console only.


Halp!
Mia
:Onyx2:
This is a Fuel hardware question, therefore it belongs here.

Is it possible to "replace" the Fuel power supply with a PC one? Has anyone tried this? Mine died... you get the idea.


Thanks!
:Onyx2:
bplaa.yai wrote:
Some time ago I compiled bacula, which included a GTK gui. If there is nothing else already available in Nekoware, I'll do a proper nekoware package of bacula.


Bacula is quite acceptable for home use, but I'd recommend Amanda for more critical stuff. It's free as well and works quite fine on Irix.
If somebody wants a 600Mhz working module for O2, I have one I could sell, just PM me with the right price.

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Outstanding, could you share the source?
May I ask, really, what would you do if you had the full source code of 6.5.30, or windows 7 or whatever. I doubt a single individual would make any significant changes to it. At best, you'd find a way to recompile it, and then what, really.
I have an issue on an old O2, the cdrom tray wants to remain open, when I slide it in, it just pops right out. Even under the "bios" (so it's not an OS issue).

Help!
Mia
:Onyx2:
kubatyszko wrote: You may want to check the eject buttom - maybe there's something stuck around, or maybe even some gear mechanism inside has a chipped piece of something that prevents it from latching to close.


Nah, that one looks okay.
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PymbleSoftware wrote: Search the forums... O2s with CDROM tray issues are a cmmon occurance. There is a cog in the drive that comes off the spindle. I think there was even a link or two off the O2 wiki page. http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/O2#CD-ROM

R.


Not good, I think the spring or rubber band of some kind died in the cdrom itself.

Is it easy to replace the cd-reader? Can I just get the same item number and then it's just a drop-in replacement?
:Onyx2:
PymbleSoftware wrote:
mia wrote:
PymbleSoftware wrote: Search the forums... O2s with CDROM tray issues are a cmmon occurance. There is a cog in the drive that comes off the spindle. I think there was even a link or two off the O2 wiki page. http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/O2#CD-ROM

R.


Not good, I think the spring or rubber band of some kind died in the cdrom itself.

Is it easy to replace the cd-reader? Can I just get the same item number and then it's just a drop-in replacement?


Again search the forums, a SCSI CD-ROM is pretty much a SCSI CD-ROM, unless you want to boot off it (then you need something that is 512 byte addressible)...
There were even reports of someone sticking a DVD-ROM in an O2... somewhere... I don't recall where right now.

Easy to replace...? not really.. I broke all the plastics on my O2 with the tray issues and had to glue them back together on mine.... the plastics is extremely brittle..

R.


Damn, not good at all.
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So even with the same exact Cd-rom drive it's a pain to replace????
:Onyx2:
PymbleSoftware wrote:
mia wrote: So even with the same exact Cd-rom drive it's a pain to replace????

For me, yes... Its the palstics I am talking about... See the curved front door thing...
See the those liitle clips on the side that hold the front drive face plate..?
Those were the first things I broke and had to glue back together..
You might be more skilled at delicate & intricate work like that.


R.


Mine is a XM-6201TA... I'm not sure how easy it would even be to find something somewhat compatible. What a pain!
:Onyx2:
I would really, really like the following available as a nekoware tardist.

mp3splt: "command line interface to split MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files without reencoding"
rtorrent: "ncurses BitTorrent client based on LibTorrent from rakshasa"
pigz: "Parallel Implementation of GZip"
c-ray: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/c-ray.html
pine/alpine: "Text-based email client, friendly for novices but powerful"
comix: "GTK Comic Book Viewer"
octave: "GNU Octave language for numerical computations"
rpl/2: http://www.rpl2.net/
nut: http://nut.sourceforge.net/
ckermit: "a serial and network communications package"
hptalx: http://hptalx.sourceforge.net/
minicom: "friendly menu driven serial communication program"
bonnie++: "Hard drive benchmark suite."


Mia
:Onyx2:
This is a way cool project. I have run an O200 with a SI for a while, then I moved it to a radtech psi card (much much better), although it was too noisy and slow to be competitive efficiently with my octane. So eventually, I sadly got rid of it. The O200 is damn noisy, especially with a gigachannel.


Mia
:Onyx2:
I thought I could quit too, I went back to it after 2 years.
We should start a club, like AA.
:Onyx2:
Folks,

In this great document:
http://www.wiwd.uscourts.gov/opinions/pdfs/2006-2009/06-C-611-C-01-30-08.PDF

Code:
"IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF WISCONSIN"
"SGI vs. ATI/AMD"


is mentioned about the "Bali" framebuffer, I would like to have more information about this project, would you be able to share some pointers, such as:

- what architecture.
- hardware targeted.
- etc.


Thanks!
Mia

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So IR4 == Bali? I'm confused.

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Did it reach a prototype?

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haha that's awesome!
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ClassicHasClass wrote:
Anyway, nice to join the board and if anyone has any leads on a Presenter cable, I'd sure love to get it working.


Well, welcome aboard.

The main reason why I no longer use any indy myself is due to the memory limitation (256MB doesn't cut it anymore), and the fact that it's getting somewhat difficult to find reasonably priced ram for such machine (it's almost cheaper to get an O2). Yet, the indy is a fantastic machine. I used it as a workstation for many years and then as a shell box; but my current projects require some beefier hardware (even with very optimized workloads and a very fast IO subsystem).

Before you decide if you would like to move towards an O2 or Octane, I suggest that you first figure out which applications/tasks you would like to run on your SGI, as you know, those "niche" machines are very good in specific assignments; i.e. running FP intensive tasks, compilation, video, streaming, etc. The O2 is a different world from the Octane, it's not worse or better, it just targets different customers (IMHO). As I see it, they're not really general purpose machines, although, some may argue that the "workstation" class (indigo, indy, o2, and a few others) are/were.

To add a bit of historical facts to this thread, SGI's corporate mailserver "Crom" (if I remember correctly) was a challenge L, all the way through 2008: crom.corp.sgi.com. Not so bad for a machine that was discontinued 10 years earlier. Crom also ran the backup tape library, with the help of another challenge and about half a dozen scsi disks.

The O2 could be, for instance, a terrific shell server with its gig of ram, low power consumption, mirrored disks (in the case of the R5/7k), 100MBps integrated nic and it's not really loud (unless you use some seagate :) ) But you already know all that. In any case, glad you joined, just put this excellent hardware to good use.

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:Onyx2:
This is really cool!

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legalize wrote:
I have a couple of the "Vault L" boxes, CMN A012. They are a little taller than a PI but have the blue-green color of the Indy. I'd love to have icons for these and I can take better pictures if that would help. You can see them in the corner between shelving units in this pic:

http://computergraphicsmuseum.org/wp-co ... ove-13.jpg


Thank you, this picture almost makes me feel not too guilty myself.

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I'm not familiar with these workstations, what were they primarily used for, pro/E, catia and similar? or more generally, development work?

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Curiosity.

Are you going to develop N64 games? Or is this just for serious fun?
:Onyx2:
cmonkey wrote: @mia - Yes, I do intend on using the U64 board (if and when I ever get hold of one!) for developing N64 games, mainly 2D platform games. That's what I currently do with my SN64 dev kit but I'd prefer to develop on an Indy/U64 combination for personal reasons.


Way cool, you should blog that. Even if I have no interest in gaming or N64 stuff, I think this is great.
Was the SDK easy to retrieve, after so many years?
:Onyx2:
I have a digital DS10 maxed out (not DS10L), but I live in the US.
It runs digital unix, windows NT/2000, openvms, and a few opensourced OS.
if anyone is interesed...

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Screenshots would be nice!
:Onyx2:
Out of curiosity, how much power does it draws?

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urbancamo wrote:
A ZX6000 with a single PSU, two 1.3Ghz Madison class processors, three 15k hard drives and 16GB of RAM idles at 380 watts. If you were to remove drives, a processor and some RAM you could probably make quite a dent in this figure.


380W!

I think the Altix 350 is roughly 250W with 2x1.5Ghz I2 and a few disks. Why such discrepancy?

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3D studio has been ported to irix (it ran on a power indigo2), but I don't think it was ever commercialized (it was a port of 3DS 4.0 from Dos) nor supported. Instead, the project was killed and Max was launched.

It runs well on R10k indigo2, with solid or above, it's pretty snappy and fun to use.

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:Onyx2:
They are nice boxes, and I was always impressed by the quality of their design and make.
It would make a very nice nekoware mirror; do me a favor though, and once you have it setup could you please measure the power drawn?

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I can't possibly imagine coding without emacs.
On irix I also use jasspa, which is really fast, even on old SGIs; I highly recommend it.

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What is the status today of running OpenVMS 8.3 alpha or 8.4 itanic on emulated hardware, notably: ski (the ia64 emulator), qemu, virtutech simics (3.x) etc.
Is it even possible? I've heard that simh runs Openvms 7.3 nicely, although it's 7.x, not 8 and it's relatively slow; but it works on Irix!

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:Onyx2:
Now if only someone could port emacs 22.3 to nekoware... (neko has 22.1).

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:Onyx2:
too bad then, no viable option there.

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