The collected works of smj - Page 5

Thanks for sharing this, telackey. DINA is a great tool, if only to avoid repetitive stress injuries (RSI) from swapping CDs so many times. This is a platform I would probably never have tried, but may be more practical or desirable for some folks trying to get started with IRIX.

I added a section to this wiki page where you could fill in the steps you took to setup DINA under Hyper-V. You can refer to the section on setting up DINA 1.0 under Linux+VMware as an example.

kubatyszko wrote: Good idea, challenge accepted
[...]
But since this is nowhere high on my list it will take some time...

Heh - we've waited this long, waiting a year or two longer isn't that big a deal.

madmax wrote: Stepped through the firmware image in a hex editor and found some undocumented commands, one of which is "let the carnage begin"... executing this command on l1 turned the "security" feature off and reset the system serial to match the other bricks.

This inspired me to fire up half of my O300 just to see what it would do:

Verrrry interesting... Might come in handy as I try to integrate the L2 and NUMALink Router I got via ePay (I believe from a parted-out Prism).

Appreciate all the hard work going on here. Only comment: If I'm going to buy a PSU rather than use one I have on-hand, I'd take the top specs from kubatyszko's three tables rather than the minimums, then look for at least a Plus 80 Bronze efficiency rating. Idea being to not have to do this over again any time soon, and not have to ever worry about exceeding the supply. I'd guess this would still come in under $100 for a brand new PSU from a reputable seller with a quiet product.

Understood and appreciated! I had figured I might wind up looking at 1kW PSUs to meet all the output requirements and just not putting much of a load on them, but your point about 12V versus 3/5V is well taken. I should look up some of the ATX server PSUs to see what that segment looks like...

Finally hooked up the L2 and NUMALink Router I bought a while back with the two Origin 300 bricks. Cabled everything up, powered up the L2, then each O300 brick...

Interesting to see that each brick seems to have it's serial number cleared whenever the L2 first detects it. I knew the L2 would push/enforce it's serial number, but interesting to see it in action. After I checked the serial number at the start of this, I plugged in the power for the NUMALink Router.


Okay, let's plug in the first O300 brick. Note that this first brick temporarily shows as 001?01 while being initialized by the L2 controller.

Plugging in the second O300 brick...


Initially, however, the second brick was not being seen as part of the system at the PROM level:


This persisted across some resetenv and reboot_l1 commands on 001c02. When the PROM initialized, it would still only see 1 object:


I powered everything down, un/plugged 001c02, and brought it all back up and that apparently did it:


The OS install was left over from a test run so I'll scratch that, decide on .22 or .30, and load some Nekoware so I can put these CPUs and the Router through their paces.

Adrenaline wrote: Congrats on getting it all hooked up with an L2, one day I hope to get one too.

Thanks - no drama, which I had half expected. The L2 Emulator from the L3 software package worked just fine, but this L2 was too good a deal to let get away. Ditto for the router. Though at this point all I've done is increased my electric bill for no change in performance...

In your case would you use it with O300s, A350s, or... both?

Having the L3 software running in a VM on a cheap laptop is cheap, makes for a convenient console, etc etc. I currently use a Thinkpad R52 with a 2GHz Pentium M - plenty fast enough for this, plus browsing Nekochan. And one of these days I'll look into the performance monitoring software that's in the L3 package.

This laptop also runs DINA in another VM, for fast installs or updates. A hard drive with a few dozen GBs provides plenty of room for IRIX and Nekoware. Highly recommended...

Here's a picture of the system. The L2 controller is out of sight.

Ian, have you checked the switch to make sure that the port with the GBIC you're connecting the O2 to is configured to communicate with the other ports? I'm just thinking of a switch I got that had a config with some ports on different VLANs, and I hadn't had reason to check the config until I was tearing my hair out over a machine that couldn't see the rest...

jan-jaap wrote: Cable management is on of the things taken into account from the start.
I'm planning a gutter in the concrete floor, some 10cm deep, 20cm wide, all around along the wall.

Is this the reason for the double framing around the foundation? Or did the cable routing gutter not make it into the final plans?

Adrenaline wrote: I replaced my fans in my O300s with these: (link)

Thanks for the link, Jared.

Adrenaline wrote: Because the power connector for these fans does not match the proprietary O300 power connector on the motherboard, I simply wired them to the 4 pin molex power connector that is used to power the U160 drives. I disabled env because of this, but I setup a script to run env via the l1cmd to ensure everything is still within spec.

Nothing wrong with this, or with recycling the original connectors, but they may be available as Molex p/n 14-56-2034 (thanks to pierocks , and ignore the incorrect diagram on this Molex page ).

I have a bad FAN1 in my 001c02 brick, and if I can manage the expense I'm tempted to replace them all. Getting new connectors in a small enough quantity may be a challenge, though.

Mouser doesn't stock them, and minimum quantity is a roll of 1,920 @ US$0.773, or $1,484. Digikey doesn't have them in stock either... If I find a source, I'll share it here.

Adrenaline wrote: After doing the swap, I can barely hear my O300s being on.

That's the second biggest incentive, after the failed fan...

competentcompton wrote: So they could be spliced in are the colours/signals the same for the existing one, I can check but I have to wait to open my unit up.

Oh they've definitely been spliced in before, yes! I'm just tempted by the platonic ideal of a fresh new connector -- but believe me, I'll bodge things up if I can't get hold of the needed parts (or can't stomach the price)...

Here's evidence of such a splice job (scroll all the way to the bottom - from a Fuel, but odds are if I had the intestinal fortutide to do a little more searching I could confirm the wiring): viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9046

competentcompton wrote: I looked at that and it seems to have the wires seriously crosed over.

Hope I'm not misreading, but -- yes, the SGI pinout is known to be "unique." I thought that was covered pretty clearly in the old posts you mentioned...

Hope somebody with a clue responds, it sounds like it would be a good thing to harvest and instantiate elsewhere...

I dunno about Ubuntu, but your display issue would normally be a no-brainer provided you have shared home directories across the boards and are careful to propagate environment variables such as DISPLAY - the shared .Xauthority file would (traditionally) take care of the rest. But I notice my Fedora 16 box doesn't even create .Xauthority, so perhaps in the name of security modern Linux requires you to run "xhost +" ... :/

You already know lots of people have gronked up things to find the lowest loaded host in a set and launch apps accordingly - from very simplistic to baroque. Have you considered something like (Open)MOSIX, that would give you behavior like a single system image? That's consistent with SGIs history on the Onyx/high-end side and lets you focus on the ideas you mentioned about evolving 4Dwm. SSI may get you the display redirection for "free."

More interesting question - you have molds for casting the front panel bits, and measurements/plans for the sheetmetal. Any thought of taking orders...?

Whoops - sorry, I'd seen that OpenMOSIX was stagnant, but hadn't remembered that it was x86 only - in fact MOSIX.com releases are for x86_64 only. Oh well...

Look at it as an excuse to learn/use MPI!

Oh, what the hell - in for a pair. I can always figure out the emitter side later...

Noticed this earlier, started to remove them, forgot, now complete. Were the dead links doing anything heinous to the board?

Perfectly cromulent reasons to remove them.

I've finally seen this enough times that I added a section to the O300 wiki page on fan replacement and connectors.

In digging up thread references and part numbers, I noticed that pierocks appears to have checked out and documented the color coding of O300 fan wiring in this reply .

PM sent for ACARD.

Did you keep the matching bowling ball & bag? :O

I kid, I kid -- I'm no fit judge of The Motor Company's products. But I can say with confidence: That's a great looking bike!

There absolutely are bowling alleys left -- there are even bowling leagues left! I was such a one until one team mate moved cros country a 1.5 years ago and the other two decided not to continue with it. (One was in two other leagues, the other was just busy.)

Sometime after this week I'll have to schedule some time with a shop to go over my '94 EX500 - unless I decide to try doing the long-overdue valve adjustment myself... 50/50.

Congratulations! Sounds like it was a good addition for you even without the extra CPUs.

I've got a box of quieter fans to try and swap into my O300s (Adrenaline's Cooler Master units). You might want to check the threads referenced from a recently-added section of the O300 nekowiki page . But with the Octane you're all set for remote access, so you could just put it out in the garage or down in the basement.

Welcome! To posting, at least. Hopefully somebody can set you up with at least one case+PSU - Indys seem small and cute to me now, so hopefully you can assemble one to play with soon. Have you identified the gfx cards yet?

You've done a lot for the community over the years, Harry - thank you! I hope you still plan to drop by Nekochan from time to time.

This has been incorporated into the Origin 200 wiki page .

vishnu wrote: If they'd finished the hole in Texas it would have been found 10 years ago, at least.

Amen, brother. Instead Texas gets Governor Perry bragging about how well their abstinence-based "sex education" programs work, despite one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation... (Fourth as reported by WAOI San Antonio on 10-Apr-2012; see also Guttmacher report )

At least the project in Waxahachie inspired one of my favorite songs (" Supercollider ") from one of my favorite bands (Boston's Tribe ).

The opening ceremony of any Olympic session is a chance for the host country to brag about how swell they are. They typically highlight the achievements they feel good about - Industrial Revolution, spy thrillers (Mary Popp- er, James Bond) - and ignore the ones they don't - Luddites, cesspool journalism, globe-spanning colonialism, etc. So I'm mildly surprised they remembered TB-L, but it's completely in line with the event. And as for participating - come on, the guy's human, who's going to walk away from that kind of ego boost?

It's all a marketing exercise. 'Nuff said.

"Xoraxia392's Scandalous Mind Meld with the Cynerian Ambassador Exposes Her Surgically Enhanced Insectoid Ovipositor!"

I, for one, welcome our surgically enhanced insectoid overlords! Like the man said, "we'll make great pets."

josehill wrote: I was supposed to head to NYC tomorrow to hobnob with some tech investor types. I think I'm going to stock up on canned goods instead.

Is this display going to wind up in sgifanatic's Indigo Reborn case, by any chance?