The collected works of mia - Page 4

I write filesystems.

Why bother, I use an O2 to net-install.

Well, if you have only one SGI then the gain of using a network-based installer is marginal.

I had random crashes on my O2 with 5.1 during makeworld, I'll probably give this one a shot. I think it might have been a bug Miod was working on earlier this year. He's done so much for this port, I should have at least provided him with a trace. I'll test and do that.

Yes, is this a hardware bug?

I'd like to buy an onyx2 backplane, shipping will be to Seattle, WA.

Thanks!

Deskside yep. The one where the XIO cards connect to.

Would they work in an onyx2? I always wondered.

Would they work in a deskside?

Today, I figured I'd give AlphaNT a try, not NT4.0; but windows 2000RC2 "Professional" (build 2128) ... on alpha.

I dug up my trusty DS10; an adaptec 39160 an elsa gloria synergy, some old NT cdroms from a MSDN kit; and decided to give it a shot, for the sake of (bad) computer history. To spice things up a little, I've used a SSD with an Acard adapter (just because I'm out of non-defective scsi disks right now).

Since I'm not very familiar with windows, I'll just relate what I've done, you can shred some light on my mistakes in your posts below.

1) Partitioning.
Because I couldn't figure out how to partition a drive from ARC, I've done it from my laptop, using a SATA to USB adapter, leaving the boot partition as fat16, bootable, 10MB and another of 65,536MB for ntfs, as a second partition. Then I formatted the first partition from ARC.

2) Installation.
It's pretty straightforward, just make sure you have a first partition of 10MB (and not much more) for the boot files, and a second partition for the operating system. The installation is relatively fast and painless. When the installation is complete Setup asks you to write down the following information:



Then it reboots.

3) First boot.
After entering the information provided by Setup, the machine boots normally, it takes only a few seconds to reach the Wizard. Before I have the time to chose anything, Setup spends a few minutes and progress bars to detect devices.



Which it did.

After a few clicks (input devices, timezone, domain, etc.) Setup installs the "components" (I wonder what it installed previously), menu items, and finally: "Saves settings". This last step takes the longest time because the cdrom was greatly solicited while saving the settings (don't ask, I have no idea why).

When it asked for the date, I've entered year 2038, as it is an evaluation version; I want to give myself enough time to evaluate it properly.

Then it reboots.

4) Second boot.
This wizard helps me connect my computer to the network, great! It didn't even ask me for my ip address. Anyway.

It works! The resolution is very good, no need for another video card (this one also works fine with Tru64 and OpenVMS). It ships with Internet Explorer 5 (oh well). The network cards are detected without the need for additional drivers.

Next steps: Microsoft Word 97, Excel 97, Visual C++ 6.0 and FX!32.

So far, no crash. You are right FX!32 is built-in, I didn't know that. I've installed Word and Excel, putty and a vnc server so far; I'm now using it remotely.

I'm looking for:

- A native gnu toolkit for alpha. <--- Found it!
- a Xserver <--- Found it!
- a "recent" (native) version of firefox.

I'd say it's worth a try.

That does sounds like a full day of work, I would think those would be identical in size, anyone knows for sure?

I found a copy of eXcursion (the X server for alphaNT), and sent firefox on the alphaNT workstation via the X protocol, it seems slow and hardly usable, I might be looking for something else; it's still fun though.

I see, so if I were to get a new metal cage and new motherboard, I would, in fact, have a O2k in an onyx2 "case", right? Of course I would have to get an IO6 as well. Do they share the same power supply?

Too bad Irix doesn't have trim support though. You should run diskperf btw.

Doubt anyone wants to trade in the Seattle area; all those onyx2 were junked from Boeing, I don't think they had a whole lot of origin2k.

Advances in technology are amazing, not only in cpu, but the same can be observed in memory density, storage, networking, gfx etc.

Pre-2000 our 7TB nfs storage array spanned over 2000 drives; it was running on sun (tatung) clones, and the clients were freebsd hosts; it felt fast and large back then, now you can have roughly the same thing in a desktop; for a mere grand.

Now, the real question isn't how fast it is, but how you use it, if it's to run World of Warcraft or watch movies, then I think it might be somewhat overkill, but if it's to run a clustered filesystem, it might be worth it.

I see some people doing stuff on their 16Mhz arduino that's probably more useful than someone's $500 microsoft surface. Oh and I forgot to mention, Apollo 11's computer was 2Mhz; they made it to the moon and back; about 40 years ago (they probably wouldn't have made it back if they had had a microsoft surface instead).

I found a bug in windows 2000 alpha build 2128 (but I suspect it is in the video driver), when the resolution is set to its maximum, the machine fails to complete the next boot, when it's set to its minimum (640x480x256) it boots well (then the resolution can be adjusted without rebooting. The workaround of course is to lower the resolution before each reboot. Because I'm a sensible person, I emailed a description of this issue to [email protected] , not forgetting to mention the architecture used, build number and hardware configuration.

We'll see what they say; if they make a service pack, I will buy some MSFT stock (don't count on that though).

me! (indigo 2@250Mhz SI)

Trust me, that may not be the case for everybody.

you could really build a neat openvms network with that; with decdfs and all that.

My shrink keeps asking me the exact same question.

++

more^2

I don't understand why/how we do not see your feet on "Nykarleby plaza"?

Pkgsrc (2012Q3) on Tru64 5.1B (ongoing work)

Note: it's relatively straightforward compared to irix, this is how I've done it.

- unpack in /usr, as normal.
- edit pkg_install and libfetch's Makefiles, replace as such:
.if !empty(USE_BUILTIN.openssl:M[yY][eE][sS])
becomes:
.if !empty(USE_BUILTIN.openssl:M[yY][eE][sS]) && ${OPSYS} != "OSF1"

bootstrap with ccc:
- run bootstrap (in /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap), as such:
- env CPP=/usr/bin/cpp CC=/usr/bin/cc ./bootstrap --compiler ccc

bootstrap with gcc:
- install gcc-4.2.3-osf1-5.1b.tar.gz (google search that)
- run /usr/local/gcc4/libexec/gcc/target/version/install-tools/mkheaders
- cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap
- env CC=/usr/local/gcc4/bin/gcc CFLAGS=-O2 ./bootstrap --compiler gcc

then:
/usr/pkg/sbin/pkg_admin -K /var/db/pkg fetch-pkg-vulnerabilities

Worked well for me, so odds are that it might even work for you.
BTW: I'm looking for help with some packages, if you have some spare cycles.

Interesting, I shoot film, so that's relatively more complicated this way.

They speak English better than I speak Chinese.

Isn't google rightfully blocked in china?

A NAS is not a backup solution, I use tapes for backup (on multiple OS including, but not limited to, Irix of course).

If you want to archive to disk, then you should either run amanda (to disk), or a worm-like filesystem, like plan9port's venti/vac or, eventually, plan9's cwfs64.

If that's too exotic for you (I ran 36TB on venti with no problem), then don't do raid, do zfs with 2 parity disks, exported to Irix via nfs. Zfs has block checksum, which LVM/XVM/whatever don't have, then don't forget to collect smartmon data from your drives, you might be surprised.

Don't buy disks too fast (15krpm), they trend to have more *silent* errors than 7.2 or 10krpm, heat and power are also of concern on faster spindles.

Wow, just hearing this gives me chills.

I have a few if someone needs any.

I'd like a LX better.

vsimm

Cool, what are you going to run on it?

Ah? I thought you'd run nextstep or something like that.

I still have a shell on Eskimo.com, which runs SunOS 4.1.4 (they also have more powerful shell servers of course, but I only use their SunOS box, which is super snappy).

This question comes back now and then, people comparing a 10 years old computer with a 15 years old computer.

Simply put, neither can pretend to come anywhere close to the performances of today's computers, especially graphic-wise.
Yet, many people still use the MIPS platform because they already have a considerable amount of money invested in software and there's no need to make it faster. Or, just like me, because MIPSpro isn't available anywhere else (except using quicktransit).

With this being said, focus on the few little things which are often ignored, the Octane2's noise level is too much for a quiet office (IMHO), and the power consumption is about 1.5x the fuels' (it might matter if you intend to leave it powered on 24/7). The Octane2 looks better, but, again, so does the O2; if you're buying used, shipping the fuel would save you a few bucks over the Octane.

Also, the Fuel will accommodate Sata drives (although, I urge you not to put anything critical on those, even with raid, but that's the topic of another discussion).

If you decide later to upgrade to a Tezro, the Fuel's memory sticks are identical, so you could save a few bucks there.