The collected works of smj - Page 14

Check this post earlier in the thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16727812#p7361446

I don't recommend it when Dovecot or UW IMAP Server will meet your needs, but as a reference point I run Cyrus on my own server, supporting a few small domains. Powerful, flexible, and at times frustratingly arcane - and ludicrous overkill for what I'm doing with it. But then I worked for a company selling MTAs, mailstores, and webmail front ends designed to scale up to installations with 100,000+ users, so my expectations are pretty ludicrous too.

If you want to run your own mail server, I'd recommend using a real or virtual server in a proper data center.

• A VM with root access costs US$10-15/month
• Home-based power and connectivity outages don't impact service
• Less likely to wind up on somebody's DNSBL (IP address blocklist) thanks to the botnet-du-jour
• Hosting company will often include secondary DNS and MX

Jealous! Maybe more jealous of (what I assume and hope are) cheap electricity rates...

bjornl, any reason why you stuck with SLES9? Nothing wrong with that, but the last supported version was SLES 11 SP2. Is there a graphics subsystem in play, or in the future, since SLES9 + ProPack includes support for SGI-ATi cards?

bjornl wrote: There is also an L3 controller on top and an FC cabinet with disks. Now I have to learn abount FC disks too

Do you mean an L2 controller? An L3 would typically be a PC running software...

Glad to hear the machine is response again, and that you've managed to bring all the CPUs back online. Huzzah!

Not sure about the problem you're having booting SLES, though. This is a problem booting the existing installation, judging from the "sda4" in there.

Edit: Oh, right, you posted about installing SLES9 the first week of August. So pretty recently. You had rebooted a few times after installing, right? And didn't apply SP2, from your comments? Can you still boot from CD/DVD? Is there a rescue mode/disc, and if so does it suggest anything useful?

bjornl wrote: I'm giving up on SLES9 now anyway and moving on to SLES11SP2. It has less discs to shuffle when installing
This time I'm also going to erase old partitions.

Don't forget you need a special EFI partition, I'm forgetting the details but it should be covered in the installation guide.

I checked my Altix 350 Friday and I've got SLES11 SP1, not SP2. Let me step back and explain the chain of logic that led me to ignore SP2.

I wanted the appropriate ProPack for SLES11. Why? Here's what SGI says you get :

sgi wrote: SGI ProPack 7 is the next generation of SGI's suite of performance optimization libraries and tools that accelerate applications and provide additional capabilities for SGI high performance computer systems.

The SGI ProPack 7 releases focus on the value-add features SGI develops such as the SGI Message Passing Toolkit, linkless FFIO, XVM volume manager, numatools, cpusets, Unified Parallel C, global reference unit (GRU) and superpages support on SGI Altix UV and SGI REACT Real-Time for Linux.

Sounds pretty cool, right? But if you check the release notes , PP7 only works with SLES11, and PP7 SP1 only works with SLES11 SP1. There is no PP7 for SLES11 SP2.

Furthermore PP7 SP1 requires SFS2 SP1 or later. Okay, if we check this page we can see which versions of SFS2 work with different versions of SLES11 and RHEL6. Oh, no IA64 support with RHEL6, and no IA64 versions of SFS2 after SLES11 SP1. Okay then, that leaves us with the following if you want an IA64 Altix with the latest possible Linux and ProPack:

SLES 11 SP1
SGI Foundation Software (SFS) 2 SP1
SGI ProPack 7 SP1

If you have SLES11 SP2, go for it - I doubt you'll really miss out on much. Maybe one of these days I'll report back on some amazing thing that ProPack 7 does for me, and in that case you can consider downgrading. I really just wanted to document how I decided to stop at SLES11 SP1.

surrealdeal wrote: staggering

Ah, I see surrealdeal has tried to lift the monitor in question...

I think these wallpaper images were showing correctly back in April, but they aren't now. Sent a PM to modology, since he's been around recently. Hopefully he can upload a tarball and we won't have to worry about imageshack...

Modology responded and indicated he doesn't think he has the sources for these images any longer.

Anybody around who downloaded them (and can find them now)? Please feel free to tar them up and post as a local attachment!

I added a "Modifications" section to the Octane page on the wiki , with pointers to the clearest lightbar mod thread I could fine ( viewtopic.php?f=5&t=16724191 ) and an excellent how-to by Kurt Huhn .

If you did want OSX and couldn't find somebody with a disc you could borrow, you might be able to dig up an ISO image from Apple if you have access to the developer program. Don't have details, but a friend is a long-time Apple dev and had lost his Jaguar (?) DVD. A few releases later, this was how he got a copy. YMMV, and the dev program may still be more $$$ than you'd want to spend.

Trippynet wrote: I think SGI should have come up with a better/more robust solution than a little bulb that would pop after a few years.

Actually, that was covered. If you remember the recent thread on the 2006 SGI price list, there was a section left out that covered basic maintenance tasks: bulb replacement, power cord swaps, dust removal, emptying /dev/null, and the like.

I'm happy to offer these services for a reasonable additional fee whenever I'm hired to perform an on-site IRIX upgrade .

jan-jaap wrote: I'll be the CS-H/W-ENGINEER . In case you're wondering, that's an Onsite Hardware Engineer. For a measly fee of $225K/yr I'll swap bits and pieces in and out of your systems. Have extensive experience with just about every MIPS/IRIX system. Customer will have to provide access during evening hours as I have a regular job already

Did I mention I'm available full-time, business hours, for $10k less? PM/email for CV. References available upon request.

Groovy - thanks tomvos! There may be one or two other cut-down versions of the Tezro images (1600x1024, or 1024x768) judging from the original links, if anybody is still digging.

If I had a FireMV 2200 sitting here, I might pop it in the Altix 350 just to see what it does with it. But aside from the not-inconsiderable "Cool it works!" factor, I'm not sure what the benefits would be over remote display - assuming non-3D display over PCI. Maybe different for a 3D card on PCIe, in a 4xx/4xxx...

ClassicHasClass wrote: I can't see the point of getting the whole spectrum except if you're really obsessive. They're too damn bulky.

I was going to quip: Not if your fanboi shrine-cave is the size of a generous studio apartment.

Then as a chill ran down my spine, I looked around my house...

Certain background or root window images immediately take me back to the monochrome workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. Xphoon is one, the monochrome version of this astronaut doing an EVA (or one very similar - I failed to craft a good enough incantation for Google image search...) is another.

bradbobak wrote: This is probably not the problem, but when i was playing around with my sunblade, the case had to be closed before the system did anything.. was scrathing my head with an open case not working.

Good point - I've been bitten by this with some servers and at least one workstation-type deskside/tower. Look around for switches or contacts mounted anywhere on the internal frame...

commodorejohn wrote: They decided to skip version 9, for no reason that any sane mind can fathom.

Allow me to share random, unattributed speculation from some IRC channel - so you know it must be true!

So Microsoft skipped Windows 9 because popular software (Including JAVA) uses "Windows 9" as a string to identify Windows 95 and 98... *omg*

Very pleased with Fractal Design's Define R4 , which I bought from NewEgg. It's not at all flashy, but it's very well thought-out and with attention to the cooling and SSD, mine's virtually silent. Exception would be if I fire up something that makes heavy use of OpenGL - then you can hear the old nVidia 550 Ti spin up it's turbine...

But the R4 compares well to the Mac Pro (2008) next to it. The Dell PWS 690 sounds like a turboprop by comparison.

The R4 is on sale today (Oct for $70

foetz wrote:

armanox wrote: we should consider making an update for nekoware....

how about banning it?
who would use bash voluntarily on a real unix? even more so since zsh, tcsh and multiple ksh variants are available.

nobody needs bash. it's always been a mystery to me why it became so popular except for being the dummy shell for linux

Tempting on an emotional basis, perhaps. But because it is the only shell the Linux mob will ever think of, we will see complex scripts in packages that expect a current-ish version of bash. Better to have one with the proper security patches.

Also, folks coming from Linuxdom and picking up the SGI/IRIX habit will look around for bash pretty quickly. Might as well make it easier for them to indulge their new addiction, rather than creating an obstacle that prevents anybody from joining the club.

I saw the smiley, and I'm sure you can see these arguments for yourself. But what the heck, why not toss it in the thread for reference...

TeamBlackFox wrote: tcsh is good, but why not zsh? All the features of bash plus ksh plus some.

I'll speak as a confessed tcsh fan and former consultant/sysadmin - laziness. I took to csh when I first got access to 4.3BSD and SunOS 3 systems, and tcsh was already in circulation - years before I ever heard of zsh, even a couple years before the first version was written at Princeton. And if I have to deal with a system that doesn't have tcsh, it almost always has csh, and all I'd really notice I've lost is command line history and some prompt setting magic.

Now that all shells are everywhere by default, I suppose I'm just a dinosaur not to invest the time... Well, right: laziness.

SAQ wrote: Trying to recall what the deal was with writing scripts running on csh. I seem to recall dire warnings of impending doom being circulated at one point, along with reminders to use !#/bin/sh.

Yes, that was a very strongly held belief - but after 20 years I'm also having a little trouble remembering why . Based on some sketchy Googling, I'm guessing it's based on SUID use being risky because of how csh selects the home directory to read dot-files from at startup. There may also be something about how the environment is inherited, or how shell variables are initialized...?

If you've got time, it looks like Matt Bishop released an update in 2009 of a security review he did on UNIX in the 80s. Grab a copy of the PDF here . It has some detail on the SUID issue, at minimum.

kjaer wrote: but... csh has always had command line history.

More laziness - should I describe it as "interactive access to command history using editing key sequences?" That was what looked like a step backwards from what was available from VMS - doubtless other systems too (TOPS, TENEX, etc), but that was the mini OS I was using immediately prior, and I don't think any of the micro OSes I was using up to that time had it.

But yes, of course csh had command history - one of the primary reasons I preferred csh over sh in the first place was the history, as accessed through constructs like "!23" or "!-2" or "^sh^s" ...

GIJoe wrote: it's all black on black inside. even in daylight i have to bring out a flashlight to see what i'm doing when going through the innards.

I think they used some white bits in mine, like the slot covers and drive mounts, just to blind people when they're working inside the case and turn their head quickly.

Also, there's a "Blackout" version as opposed to the "Black pearl" version that I got. However the latter is still, yes, plenty dark inside - I think the "Blackout" edition omits the contrasting white internal bits I got...

As to the wideness, I suppose so - but that's probably because it's built to use large (2 x 140mm included) fans and up to a 240mm water-cooling radiator, all part of what keeps things so quiet... I just used a Cooler Master Hyper (Evo?) 212 heat-pipe for the CPU, and the included fans, and that's been plenty for an old quad core Phenom II with no appreciable noise even when the Mac Pro and Dell are both asleep.

The network stack in IRIX 4 and perhaps 5 is probably still class-based - pre-CIDR, pre-variable netmask. (If somebody isn't sure what I mean, see Classful networking ) So the network stack may be rejecting a 16-bit netmask for a network number it "knows" requires a 24-bit netmask, or simply fails to work with it.

A class-aware stack should allow subnetting a Class B or Class A network, rather than trying to treat Class C networks as a Class B. But I don't imagine renumbering all your equipment to suit one or two machines is all that appealing...

Thanks for adding the UV300H (and a few other changes) to the Altix Nekowiki page .

There's a reference to NUMAlink 7 at the end of this interview from March 2014 . Not much information, though. Much of the interview (I only skimmed it) seems to present SGI's current arguments for scaling up a shared-memory systems versus using clusters.

Or consider the SCSI2SD adapter - skip the USB, and put a fast, large SD card directly on your SCSI bus. Been successfully used on a lot of retrocomputing devices, synths and samplers that speak SCSI for mass storage.

I've been using SuSE on the Itanium-based Altix systems, with decent results. You should be able to download an ISO from them at no cost.

It's been a month or so, but I believe that /boot/efi under SuSE just needed to be a small VFAT filesystem - I think the main filesystem(s) were using XFS, but I'd have to fire up a machine to confirm that.

No provenance included, unless you count the business cards taped to the machine's door. It might have gone a lot higher if the seller had put some time into chasing those two gentlemen down and found out a little more about the machine and whatever basis there is for any Spielberg connection. Or even got somebody helpful at SGI to lookup the sales records for that serial number...

You mean like this one here ?

The Personal DECstation 5000/25 is a MIPS-based workstation. You are aware it's not going to run Windows, right? Forgive me if you already know that, it's just odd to have somebody requesting "BIOS" for a MIPS-based workstation... Is there a specific problem you've run into that you think later firmware than what's already loaded would correct?

All DECstations have firmware, but none of them provide the kind of window-driven setup that PC BIOS does. While there's usually nothing wrong with updating to the last released firmware, there's also usually not a lot to be gained unless you've run into a specific problem and found an indication that a different firmware release will fix it. By and large, the firmware on these systems does little more than load and execute software (from disk, tape, CD, or the network), examine/modify memory, dump the processor state, manage a few variables in NVRAM, and perhaps a few other low-level tasks.

Let me ask a different question - what do you expect to do with any DECstation firmware you can find?

For OpenVMS Hobbyist Program, take a look at these responses: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16728429&p=7367264 and viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16728429&p=7367264&hilit=DECUS+Hobbyist#p7368258

Try to join DECUServe.org first, then you might need to wait a day or three for your new membership number to make it into the system at plato.ccsscorp.com. But the URL in that domain (from the second post linked above) should get a quick response.

I've got several x7053A RAM kits (1GB per kit) for $5/kit plus S&H, if needed.

Believe I loaded a version onto a spare 386SX PC sometime in 1993. The OS didn't make any impression more persistent than how insufferably slow that machine was.

However it simply could not be as cretinous as SCO from 1992, where I had to use loopback NFS mounts to make up for the lack of symbolic links...

Working in IT on Wall Street, we were happily getting by with just a DEC or Sun workstation on our desk in the mid-90s. Largely because we had licenses for things like Applix Aster*x (office suite), IslandWrite, ZMail, Wingz spreadsheet, etc. (Later they made us use Lotus Notes, but the UNIX version was no more/less dreadful than the PC version IIRC.)

I'm occasionally tempted to acquire a first gen (1987-88) Heath/Zenith 386 system and put *NIX on it, as this was the first "killer micro" I encountered. And it was pretty impressive, given that the Apple LaserWriter was faster for single-user jobs than my college's VAX-11/750 (provided you could do it in PostScript, with no storage).

Then I typically stop drinking for the night, and the urge passes by morning...

(We did later get a Sun 386i, and I am occasionally tempted by that notion as well.)

ClassicHasClass wrote:

However it simply could not be as cretinous as SCO from 1992, where I had to use loopback NFS mounts to make up for the lack of symbolic links...

You must be kidding. Please say you were kidding.

Sorry, but it's true. Sadly the accounting system I was charged with moving over from SunOS was built on top of Informix RDBMS + Informix 4GL, and had a number of paths* hard-coded by the knuckledraggers who gronked it up -- those paths had to work unless I wanted to be stuck going through the 4GL code. Needless to say, I wanted that project over ASAP so I could get sent to a client and therefore be immune from recall.

Anyway those NFS loopback mounts were the only way I could make it work. To be honest, I'm not even sure that crawling horror even supported longer than 14 character filenames (e.g. within a directory)...

Other people seem quite find of later versions of things marketed by SCO, and I'm sure they were much better. But this is why I would never, subsequently, have anything to do with that company - long before the (in)famous lawsuits filed under the company's name...


* The environment was, overall, in questionable condition. The local brain trust had paths like "/net/stilgar/disk3/foo/bar/..." hardcoded in dot-files, scripts, executables, this accounting package, etc. The Sun-3 named "stilgar" - among others - had been retired some years prior to this episode. The files from it had simply been copied over to a Sun-4/280 server, exported, mounted directly from the fstab on all other hosts under the path shown above, and left to rot in perpetuity...

Wasn't 1992 an election year in the US? So, depending on the month this was published...

Arrogance? Yes, Sun had plenty of it, and a touch more than most -- but it's not like it wasn't common across the entire industry. No different in Silicon Valley today than it was then. What's one of the most quoted lines from The Social Network ? "A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars." It's become part of the story our culture tells itself as a baseline about Silicon Valley...

Data General was famously aggressive in their advertising in the 70s. How would you characterize Apple's ads over the years? ("1984," congratulating MSFT on Win95, etc)

Welcome and congratulations! And good luck convincing them to give up the Tezro.

Image all hard drives as soon as you can, if you haven't already. There's a chance you'll find software and/or licenses on them later that you aren't looking for now, and there's no Undo function. (I think you understand this, but I hadn't seen it said explicitly so...)

Hopefully you'll wind up with a complete media kit at some point, because one of the things I find most interesting in tinkering with any uncommon (today, at any rate) kit is how the installation and management works. IRIX != Solaris != AIX != HP/UX != Tru64 != Linux != OSX ... But they all have their interesting features and maddening quirks, and it broadens the mind to see what they all are.

Also, go look into getting a serial cable so you can scope out the Octane. Not having a working 13W3 adapter isn't the end of the line.