The collected works of smj - Page 1

I recently acquired a working 2x250 R10k Octane, and separately a 2x360 R12k Octane2. With the latter came a "spare" Octane chassis populated with a 2x300 R12k. I was told the spare chassis had no PSU or disk, but... After getting it home and out of the impossibly tight static bag it was taped into, I found it had both -- though the 9GB drive was only held in place by the SCA connector and a matchbook ... Yet it stayed there despite me briefly having it on it's side as I tried to fit everything into the car -- glad I happened to later rotate that one upright.

The system booted for me once, but the password wasn't set to the value I was given for the working system (no surprise there). I was easily able to fix it in the other Octane chassis, but was subsequently unable to get the "spare" chassis to boot from it. The system would log multiple errors/resets on the SCSI bus. My next step was to try the drive from the working R10k system, but there appears to be an executable format difference between R10k and R12k, at least for the bootstrap/kernel.

Running the Diags from the PROM, the cursor stops spinning after a few seconds and the system appears to be wedged.

At this point I'm rqs'ing a fresh install of 6.5.18 on a random 18GB drive in the "spare" chassis with the R10k board. During the install I'm seeing "checkerboard" artifacts that make me think there's a problem in the EMXI framebuffer, but despite a few SCSI retries it seems to be working.

1. I'll have to try the diags again with a working drive installed, but don't expect much joy there. How can I find out where it's getting stuck?
2. I'm going to have to determine if the unsupported drive has damaged the SCSI backplane or pulled a connector loose. Anybody seen anything like this before in an Octane?
3. Anybody actually try to diagnose and repair these gfx cards, or is that likely a write-off?

--S.

I just spent a while putting together some icons for the IRIS 2400T and 3130, though I'm not clear if they'll be representative of each entire line. I'm working from the photo of a 2400T posted here, helf's 3130 , and memories of my own 3130 back in 1990.

2400:
3130:

I haven't been near a Crimson in a long time, but as I recall the 3130 was taller.

I'll attach the files in case Neko wants to do something with them.
--S.

Edit : These works have been made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license

After some post-Inst lockups on the "spare" chassis, I decided to make sure the IP30 w/ 2x250 and random disk were working properly in the original chassis. This included running the PROM diags, which also paused while the spinner was up, but I walked away and when I came back much later it was done (and had passed). So I might not have been patient enough with the "spare" diags, will have to retest. (That IP30 and disk/installation worked fine in the other chassis, fwiw.)

I did notice that the "spare" chassis reports Xbow 1.2, so I take it that the Xbow is part of the XIO backplane assembly? Would make sense if it's the crossbar switch...

I'll probably want to test the IP30 and MXI from the "spare" chassis in the working one next and see how they behave. And I guess I'll do another IRIX installation for R12k.I also have to go back to the respective original drives and grab the FlexLM license files and see if I can recover my "lmgrd fu" from back in the day. Guess I'll need to hope the HostID is tied to the IP30 board as opposed to the chassis...

Haven't touched the Octane2 yet as I saw it running when I picked it up, and I want to know what-all I've got before I make up a shopping list.

A very impressive job of arranging! And I love the fisheye view from outside the window...

Can you tell me what it says on the DEC masthead next to the |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| logo? I can't quite make it out, almost looks like "gamma11" to me. Just curious.

I just re-read my own initial posts and had a hard time following the swaps from chassis to chassis. Or maybe that's because I was mentally adding in the swaps that weren't mentioned. Either way, I'll try to keep it a little more focused or leave out the blow-by-blow.

Bearing that in mind, the IP30 (2x300) from the "spare" chassis had 3 x 128MB DIMMs and 3 64MB DIMMs. I'm assuming a mixed pair in one bank might account for some issues, so I took the odd pair out. It's busy installing IRIX on another spare drive in the known-good chassis to see how it behaves on a longer run... And quickly developing a desire to setup for netinstall as I swap CDs.

zuluchas: Yeah, I might be interested in those bits after I've sorted out what's bad and what's good. Would be nice to fix it with the right part(s) and release a working system back into the wild.

Really?

So, I'm talking about:
A : Green Octane found at Weirdstuff Warehouse , 2x250 R10k on -0887
B : Octane 2, 2x360 R12k on -1467 board
C : "spare" green Octane, 2x300 R12k on -1467, came with Octane2
D : Loose -1467 IP30 with 2x225 R10k, came with Octane2

A was an impulse "as-is" purchase when I spotted it at Weirdstuff. Turned out to be complete and working with 384MB RAM, 4GB HDD, "EMXI" gfx

B was running when I picked it up, and is running fine here at home. hinv posted in appropriate forum

C booted once, then rapidly got worse until it wouldn't get to the PROM. The system board included a mismatched set of RAM in the second bank that might have been causing some of the problems. But the IP30+CPU ran demos for many hours after being swapped into the A chassis with properly matched RAM. I'll come back to the chassis later.

D wouldn't light any LEDs when swapped into the A chassis. PSU started when power was connected, and power switch did nothing. Peeking through the DA15 cutout under the front skin, the top two green LEDs (R50+R51) were lit, the two below were not. I removed the 030-1271-002 CPU module and mounted it on the -1467 from C, and it powered up fine in the known-good A chassis. I put this CPU module back in the D -1467 with different (working) RAM, and the system continued to be non-responsive.

C chassis : I took the IP30+2x250 from A and popped it in, using the RAM from C (why keep things simple?) and got stuck at a lit red LED. Owner's Guide says that's likely to be a poorly seated mainboard or XIO option. Reseating the boards made no difference, so I popped out the MXI and BingoI I get the PROM on serial port 1. And the system just passed the diagnostics headless, so we're definitely on to something.

- Reinserted the MXI, back to a red LED lockup. Removed the TRAM modules, no improvement. Removed the suspect MXI and installed the MXI from A, and it comes right up and passes diags.

So in summary , all three chassis appear to be working. I've got one bad -1467 mainboard, but the CPUs and RAM were okay; and one bad MXI which can easily be replaced ... with a V6 maybe. Not seeing any more SCSI errors in chassis C at the moment.

Having just been through this myself as a new Octane owner, I'd suggest a quick glance at the Troubleshooting section of the Octane Owner's Guide . The diagram at the beginning covers the basics of what to check if you aren't getting to the PROM monitor. You'd probably cover it all on your own anyway, but nice to have it laid out methodically.

Biggest other things I can think of are the mainboard and gfx compatibility quirks that richtom1 mentioned.

Well Ol' Larry was a strong proponent of the "NC" back in the day, wasn't he?

These firms must walk a fine line - on one hand you'd want to claim credit for a great design, on the other hand you'd better not take the focus off your customer who's putting the same design before the customer as a part of their own identity/brand.

Nice to get a very, very thin slice of the development of the Octane design from Summit ID.

Looks like a nice machine from the specs I see here: HP j6750 Workstation (PDF) . But if the software or architecture don't interest you it won't compare well with current commodity boxes. HP-UX isn't my favorite variant, but it might be instructive to run through an install, no? Pierce the veil of mystery, and all that?

Fantastic work, modology. What tools are you working with to produce them?

The Oracle acquisition has had the opposite influence on me. The disappearance (in my mind, at least) of the company and falling prices have made the SunFire and later gear more attractive/interesting to me. I'm not running out to scarf it up all of a sudden, but it's working it's way up the "keep an eye out" list.

I'm still hoping I'll find a SPARCserver 1000E chassis someday - I've got the system boards, RAM, and 8 SM81 CPUs to just about max it out. Just a lingering "wish I had one of these" that got stuck in my head back around 1997...

Well, before everybody wanders off let's see it in action !

I haven't named the Octanes as I'm still reinstalling and swapping bits around. But since I've used the domain crash.com since 1994, I tend to name infrastructure after UNIX signals.

io.crash.com (fileserver - SIGIO)
emt.crash.com (host for virtualized servers - SIGEMT = EMulator Trap)
segv.crash.com (colo box - SIGSEGV)
abort.crash.com (main desktop - SIGABRT)

Laptops get whatever name seems apropriate to them - black early 2008 MacBook is blackbook, etc. Vintage gear is often named by development or code name - VAX 4000 model 500 is omega.crash.com.

Not gonna happen - too small a market, compared to the consumer electronics biz. Macs have been growing their marketshare, but not that much. Apple's growth over the past so many years has been because of what they've delivered in the CE space. It reminds me of how Sony tried to spin itself as a lifestyle company, except Apple managed to pull it off.

I'm sorely tempted. I've been carrying around a first-gen iPwn using T-Mo and was hoping to hear about a carrier other than AT&T, but the devs I was talking to turned out to be wrong on that score.

The contender is the HTC Evo on Sprint, but mostly because of the unlimited data and MiFi functionality. But Android isn't driving me wild with desire... Nice device though.

This was close by, wish I'd spotted it sooner. Then again, I hadn't been "reinfected" at that point so I probably wouldn't have bothered going. Oh well.

Didn't find coverage of the conference in a cursory search, but I did find this article covering a visit by CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh with the Greater London LUG a couple weeks later in London. It doesn't seem like a bad piece in terms of what "SGI" appears to be up to these days. Perhaps it's not unfair to say this -- that SGI's brilliance was in making complex and difficult things much easier to accomplish. For most of their history that was graphics, animation, visualization and video/film. Nowadays they may still be making the complex manageable, just with respect to single-system-image clustered computing.

The mug images in this thread seem to have vanished, but I'm interested in logo'd mugs. Very pleased to have a DEC Large Systems Group mug (PDP-10s) among mine. So I'm probably interested, though I'd like to see what they look like if they're ever produced.

Who doesn't love pizza? Suns got deployed in many places and roles, so many people have a lot of memories associated with their desktop/deskside gear. (I won't say all those memories are fond... )

I picked up an SS10 for NextStep from leaknoil a while back. Have another SS10 in storage with an SM52X - spent a lot of time trying to find a compatible SM52X for a max config of the SS10 platform, but never got the right part. Have an SS20 with something like SM71s in, but I have a pair of SM91's that I ran in there a few times. Needs more work, didn't get it stable enough to benchmark them.

Re: Evo battery life - a friend/coworker attended Google IO and received one, so I got to play with it for a short time. After watching the entire 10 minute HD "spoon killer' bit from YouTube and enabling the MiFi for a bit to update a couple apps on my iPhone, you could see the drop in the battery charge. Useful reminder, I'd been a little over-focused on plan costs and data caps...

Let me PM modology - we have his blessing, at least in a cursory way, but I'd like to make sure he's cool with something and get some higher resolution files to work with. Please stand by ...

Interesting convergence of hobbies/interests -- the Porsche Club of America will hold one of their bigger events this year about an hour from Kamloops. PCA's Escape 2010 will be held at the Sun Peaks Resort, and that's about as much as I know about it... But some PCA members I've talked to about it are worried they might have early snow and get stuck.

Precisely because you will have left by that time or will soon thereafter. Its a natural law - Nature abhors a vacuum, and she gets pissy when we create one by moving around and forcing her to rearrange everything again . You think it's easy trying to get all those marmots to sit still? And then you come along, Mr. I'll Go Where I Please Thanks Very Much ? Some days she's quite convinced she should have stopped after creating the trees and quit whilst she was ahead...

But my dear Max, I suspect you're comparing what you've seen to what you're used to in Germany. I've been told that the German police enforce traffic laws because, well, they are laws and somebody's been observed violating them. Here in the US at least, we appear to only enforce traffic laws to generate revenue or fill airtime on television.

From time to time I will mention to a US driver that there is a law on the books in many if not all states that can be summed up as: "Keep right, pass left." They usually look at me like I'm crazy. But this is almost always in or near large urban centers. Out in the less populated spaces, even if there's a fair bit of traffic on the highways people tend to behave a little more reasonably -- at least about which lane they use.

The worst case was when I brought this up with a woman I was dating. She laughed and said, in what I took as a mock-serious I'm-going-to-have-fun-with-this tone, "Oh, if they want to get by me that badly they can always go around me on the right." We laughed together for a bit, until she continued and I slowly realized she wasn't joking. The relationship didn't end on the spot, but it was badly wounded...

EDIT : Oh, and to bring this back to Kamloops -- hey pentium, you do realize you could probably fund your SGI habit by providing a regular supply of cute marmot photos and videos to places like Cute Overload, yes?

1. That's what I get for making assumptions...
2. Dear God, you found them poor drivers compared to NorCal rush hour drivers?!? The mind boggles...

They're a bit big and power-hungry, but solid boxes with several nice OSes to choose from. I have a pair of DS20E's that used to be part of Alta Vista (thanks to Guy Sotomayor) with dual 667MHz CPUs. Wouldn't mind getting a pair of 1GHz CPUs - I know 833's will work... You just have to overlook or tape over any Compaq logos you might find, if you're so inclined.

I was going to make a reference to Taiwan or India and fatalism/fortune, but realized the list could just go on and on...

Hope the new gig works out, pentium. Sounds like it could generate some interesting finds/surprises...

Even if they included the video cards, they may be configured to use a serial console, or to be run through the Lights Out Management (LOM) subsystem.More likely the latter I'd suspect, but I don't have one and haven't administered one.

Guess I should raise my hand then. Always room for an Altair; otherwise the only S-100 gear I'm really interested in having on-hand is CompuPro (Godbout/Viasyn).

Edit : Well, and the stuff that Andrew Lynch and John Monahan are producing . In particular, nice to see an IDE controller with community support and 4MB SRAM cards.

1: I love the Crimson mug. Now where the heck am I going to find one...
2: Love the reloaded design from Page 1. Surely there's someplace we can slip that through...

Hey hey hey -- percussive maintenance has a long and distinguished history ! If somebody reading this lacks the professional skills and experience to safely administer PM, they may wish to consider purchasing a kit or bringing in a professional. I'd recommend contacting the System Administrators Guild, SAGE for a referral if you don't have somebody on staff or a reliable independent practioner on retainer.

(If you can't tell this is a facetious suggestion, you should step away from the machine...)

I've been lead to believe that the only places in Sweden worth seeing are those where you are invited to have tea while seated on a Cray ...