The collected works of smj - Page 7

Nothing wrong with satisfying personal curiosity. Welcome!

I've been looking at 2011 Mac Minis for the Radeon GPU, and 2008-2009 Mac Pros. Reason is two-fold - my 2.4GHz Penryn Macbook has been acting very flaky about it's mini-DVI port (or whatever half-assed "standard" they used for that year alone), and it drags when converting video pulled down from the TiVo for archiving.

The Core i5/i7 Minis should be great performance- and power-wise, but they cost as much as an MPro 2008. And the MP's have the potential to add a lot more cores, memory, and gfx. (I haven't tried reflashing gfx cards for a Mac since the Cube, that could be a pricey upgrade.)

I keep telling myself I don't need to spend the money...

Funny, UNIX and VMS were as much about workstations as timesharing for me. I was getting exposed to Sun, DEC, HP, IBM and SGI in the late 1980s. I burrowed into UNIX and DEC history like a good larval stage, had actually used ASR33's and timeshared BASIC in middle school, Apple ][s in high school, but it was all about the "3M workstations" (1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte RAM, 1 Megapixel Display) that had become widespread in university settings... The latest VAX supermini was great for what it did, but with the first wave of the "killer micros" you could actually have a real, useful windowing system atop a multi-user, multi-tasking OS running on (or more likely under) your desk - so thanks, that VT220 looks very nice, but I'll take the Sun-3/60 w/ color framebuffer and 16" Trinitron!

Anyway I got to see Luxo Jr. and other bits of film at SIGGRAPH 1988, and that sortof set the tone - over the subsequent couple of years SGI was associated with all that in my mind because the SGI gear I occasionally saw was so much better at interactive 3D than anything else I could access...

The MacBook is mostly for Lightroom and Adobe CS. It was just easy to use Toast there to handle the TiVo downloads - I should look into doing the transcoding elsewhere anyway, I've got about 12 Harpertown cores that could be thrown at it...

I try not to have too many noisemakers running all the time, the MacBook sneaks by because it's small and quiet. In that respect the Mini would win, but all of these handle sleep/wake cycles just fine. Argument against the Mini is that I've got Lightroom 3 with CS5.5 on Snow Leopard, and I'm worried an upgrade in any other component would force a $$$ upgrade to CS6.

But I can tell I've become a "good American" -- a colleague suggested I could have somebody fix whatever the issue is with the video port on the MacBook as a cheaper option. And I was appalled to realize I hadn't even considered that. In my defense, I figured I'd just use the MacBook for my on-the-go laptop needs instead of plonking it on the desk most of the time - not like I was going to toss it...

Anyway the MacBook's video port has been behaving this week. (I'll have to hope typing that doesn't have repercussions!)

Seeing all those DVDs reminds me that I was stopped a few discs into my boxed set of Danger Man / Secret Agent, starring Patrick McGoohan. I should restart that...

I'm sure your Sunbeam Alpine will be just as nice when you get it running again, tux. This summer I found a Porsche mechanic who makes house calls, and he got my 914/6 running again. If I ever figure out what I want to do about the knackered gearbox, I might actually start to make progress next year...

I'm afraid the opposite was an attitude many people held towards the 914, since the 4 cylinder model used a massaged VW Type IV motor and these models were built completely by Karmann/VW. The 6 cylinder models were shipped as a "rolling chassis" to Porsche in Stuttgart where they received a 2.0L 911T motor, better brakes, and were in general better finished with more options. In Europe I believe all the cars were badged as "VW-Porsche," which caused additional consternation in the States where they were sold under just the Porsche name.

The gearbox for all models is taken from the early 911 and flipped around to suit the mid-engined design. The front suspension is also borrowed from the 911, while the rear uses independent trailing arms and springs instead of torsion bars. Overall they're sweet cars to drive, very capable and fun, and most 4 cylinder models use an early and successful electronic fuel-injection system for good fuel economy to boot. Over the decades people have performed almost every engine swap imaginable, from big V8s to diesels to electric.

Heh - well, the early 930s definitely left the rest of the car too close to stock while dropping in a motor borrowed from a space program.

Alright, enough. There's more on Wikipedia and if you're really curious, a great community on 914World . We now turn back from classic cars to classic computers...

Welcome crrn, and congratulations on your new Octane!

Looks like you don't have a bootable drive. Fortunately you can still find relatively new (5+ years old) SCA SCSI drives on eBay and such - you don't need more room than 9GB to get IRIX running, but a newer, faster drive is always welcome.

You're right that you'll need to get hold of IRIX media. Such media kits appear on eBay fairly frequently, just be aware that the 3 or 4 CD Overlay releases are not enough, you need something that includes the 8-10 Foundation or base set of IRIX 6.5 as well. Instructions for what to do once you have them can be found in the Nekochan wiki , though you'll see it references Ian's instructions here .

A friendly Nekochan member might be able to install IRIX on a drive for you, to get you started - I'd offer, but there's probably somebody much, much closer.

Welcome and good luck!

Far as I know the 901* gearbox was a net-new design. But you can also fit a later 915 gearbox if you flip the ring and pinion gears, and I think the same is true for the earlier 930's 4-speed gearbox. The much later G50 gearbox has to be run literally upside-down, but I understand that otherwise it goes in relatively easily.

Other swaps are possible - people do find ways to get things like 1998+ Porsche and VW/Audi gearboxes in, typically with cable shifters, but that's still an area I need to become more familiar with.


* The 911 was originally the Typ 901 , but Peugot forced Porsche not to use 90X model numbers for mass market cars, perhaps after the 904 was sold for both competition and street use in the mid-60s...

Hooray! Glad to hear the Octane is working. Now, to fix the Indigo2...

Ooof, not sure if you'd be able to build a bootable CD from tape files. We used to duplicate these tapes for distribution within the university I worked at, but that was around 1990 - I've completely forgotten how we did it for VMS.

I know for the Sun OS tapes on QIC cartridges we used tputil, which Sun provided to us, but you might want to look for copytape as tputil wasn't FOSS (see this thread , and maybe this one - use "comp.sources.unix" as an additional keyword if you plug "copytape" into Google, it's still in BSDish ports trees. Or just go to the source at gatekeeper.dec.com ).

I think it would have a reasonable shot at working with the ULTRIX tapes, and if so you might as well try the VMS tape too.

Please make sure the write-protect switch on your TK50 cartridges is in the locked/protected position!

Sorry, I've never seen the N64 development stuff. TGCware has many packages for IRIX 5.3, but I don't see tcsh there - sorry. But given that gcc *is* there, you could have tcsh...

For find(1), you ought to be able to use something like this:
to speed things up a little bit, or better still skip everything that isn't a normal file:
There are other type specs you can use, most common might be "d" for directories. You can also prefix an option with a "!" to negate it. So to search for anything other than a normal file:
find(1) is a great tool to be familiar with, especially when you use the "-exec" option to do things to the files once you've made sure your search spec is good. Like when you want to make sure files owned by an old UID are owned by a sensible user and group:
Much cleaner than just blindly using "chown -R" ...

Good luck!

Which model? After thinking I'd overcome my spendthrift tendencies, I spotted an early 2008 w/ no bids and only a couple hours left on eBay...

Framemaker and Interleaf were a big deal with the tech writers at various companies I worked for prior to ~1997. I still heart Frame. Wish it were more affordable; I think Adobe continues to ride a revenue stream from people who need to deal with SGML.

I have a mug for Asterix from Applix, an office suite competing with Island etc in the early- to mid-90s. I think they tried to offer it on Linux early on.

ZMail, the GUI mail user agent (MUA) of comp.mail.zmail fame. Again, early- to mid-'90s. Seen on many UNIX platforms, including SunOS 4/5.

Lotus Notes! We were forced to use it on SunOS around '94.

Purify and other good bits from Pure Software, before they were bought by Rational or IBM.

There's got to be some useful lists like this on some of the more Sun-focused sites. And the Sun Catalyst or Solutions CDs would be a good place too, as escimo mentioned.

Looks like the price only reflects the extra RAM, so nice catch with the 5750! Prices for the 2009's seem to hover around USD 1,200+ - I'd need to believe I'll do something with the machine that makes money at that point...

With the 2008 I'll have an interesting time figuring out how to upgrade the 2600XT on a shoestring - mostly for the challenge, after all I've been getting by with Intel GMA3100 all this time in the MacBook.

Well archive.org managed to keep the correct link to a banner ad for SysAdmin magazine, which as far as I know also met an unhappy end about 5 years ago.

You get the text - a little tough to navigate, but the important part is that the content seems to be there.

Thanks for the pointer!

Heh - well at this point, I've noticed that docs on X aren't so easy to come by. Grateful for TechPubs, to be sure, but time was you'd walk through some offices and there'd be a few copies of the whole O'Reilly stack of X Window System books sitting out abandoned. Now, not so much... That's all I was getting at, I haven't read through the article yet.

I would like to get DD-WRT or OpenWRT on my Netgear WNDR3700 one of these days...

But here's what I did ~5 years ago. I got a pretty small (25cm x 15cm x 5cm, roughly?) box off eBay with a 600MHz Celeron, 4 x 100baseT ports, 2 Mini-PCI slots and a CF slot where I've put a 4GB Microdrive. The NORCO 7732 was obviously intended as some kind of wireless router, but I got it off eBay without any radios and generic docs for the bare board - I installed one but never spent the time to try and get it working, partly because the Linksys "just worked" and partly because I was searching for an 802.11n solution.

Pictures of the NORCO are on Flickr . I hung the Linksys off one port, wired network on another, WAN off a third, and later added the Netgear WNDR3700 off the fourth. It runs pfSense , which is based on FreeBSD, which I've found to be very solid. I use the OpenVPN support with TunnelBlick on the MacBook when I travel, and that works well.

I'm not sure what's out there in terms of current hardware for this approach, but I'm sure the Alix and Routerboard folks have something. There were usually a bunch of them in Linux Journal whenever I glance at a copy.

There are often, not always, differences to the larger boxes, and each company's engineering standards certainly come into play - probably depends on which year you pick too - but you'll see these controllers up into the mid-range systems at least. Very often the bus behind the controller is the difference, and then the number of these controllers - low-end systems making due with one controller on the single system bus, high-end systems supporting a dozen on a dedicated I/O bus...

Often the only difference was whether or not the framebuffer was plugged in, and a jumper being switched on the motherboard.

Early VAXstations* were performance- and cost- competitive with other CISCy UNIX workstations, but they faded pretty quickly as RISC reached the market. By 1989 DEC introduced the VAXstation 3100 and the MIPS-based DECstation 3100 just about side-by-side, with the MIPS-based DECstation about 3 times faster. The DECstation line was absolutely needed to stay competitive in light of Sun's SPARC, HP's PA-RISC, etc.

If you wanted VMS, you needed a VAX. Many VAXstations got added to clusters anchored by larger models, allowing the primary user(s) to have a graphical workstation and increasing the horsepower of the whole cluster. VMS sites often used the built-in batch job management features to distribute workloads to available CPUs/systems throughout the day, so you could get a lot of bang for your workstation dollar in that kind of environment vs. cyclic utilization of many commercial UNIX workstations. (While people found lots of ways to address that, with VMS it was there out of the box. Well, after you paid for a cluster node license... )

VMS allegedly had good real-time support, and I worked with groups in an academic setting where they would use VAXstation II's for process- or instrument-control and data recording, then afterwards have the machine in question reboot into a cluster to off-load the data and start processing it in batch mode using faster CPUs in the cluster. The control node would then reboot into standalone mode the next time it needed to run one of these real-time tasks. Seemed pretty neat in 1989-90.



* VAXstation I - 1984; VAXstation II - 1985; VAXstation 3200 - 1988

Really? I must not be paying attention - haven't seen one on offer in ages, and I wouldn't mind picking one up if the price were right...

Result!

Yeah, uhm, I was confessing to having won that auction I mentioned seeing... My MacPro arrived late Friday - cloned the MacBook's disk overnight, then pushed stuff around in the office to make room for the tower. Heading out of town for a few days, so not much more than a first impression until next week.

Mine came exactly as described. (just kidding) Fortunately most of the marks on the case in the auction photos are streaks from poor cleaning and tape/sticker residue. The machine is stupidly quiet when running - certainly can't hear it over the PC next to it, even with the side panel off. Delightfully solid object.

I have a few Woodcrest -> Harpertown systems, and they still pack a pretty good punch for the money. Unless you need the 800MHz parts, the FB-DIMMs are priced pretty reasonably. ISTR recondas was looking at swapping the heat sinks from official Apple DIMMs to 3rd party parts - I spotted these add-on heat sinks for $20/pair in case it comes up.

If you find you want to speed things up even more, look around for some X5355 quad core CPUs @ $40-50. Same clock speed as you've got now but twice the cores, might be worth the effort involved... Worked a treat in an HP DL140. There are some games you can play with BSEL mods using parts sold for the 1066MHz bus, but at this point the difference in cost probably isn't worth the hassle.

Well my path with modern (post-68k) Macs began with inheriting a friend's "Lombard" Powerbook G3 upon his death in 2004. That led to a G4 Cube that got upgraded with a 1.8GHz CPU and reflashed Radeon 9800, then a couple TiBooks, and finally a black Penryn MacBook...

I believe there would be no software mods, let alone soldering irons - though physically removing heatsink assemblies may be challenging, some gripes about some screws on the memory cages being tough to remove. People report successful swaps on their MacPro 1,1 without a firmware update where the CPUs were not properly labeled in About This Mac, but there's a thread on putting 2,1 firmware on 1,1 machines that should cause them to be properly recognized/reported.

It's Apple, so of course you need a very long screwdriver. Looks like the SLAEG / G0 stepping X5355's feature 50% less power/heat at idle, so might be worth looking for those specific CPUs - otherwise people reported having to raise their base fan speeds to keep the temps at the same level as pre-upgrade.


Linkage:
Upgrade thread on Apple support forums
Upgrade trade-offs reviewed , e.g. quad-core CPU vs. SSD, etc
A photog's tale of upgrade
Discussion of CPU steppings and idle power draw
Upgrade procedure via static pages , circa 2007
Check this reference for proper thermal compound application

Video of procedure, part 1
Video of procedure, part 2

You're probably best served by the (Open)VMS User's Manual. You can browse it online here: http://www.openvms.compaq.com/doc/73final/6489/6489pro.html , and HP has the PDF for downloading here: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/731final/documentation/pdf/ovms_731_users.pdf . If the formatting of the HTML version is hard to read, give the PDF a shot.

Edit: Oops, you already tried that. Let's continue then...

If the going still seems tough, you could try getting a faster start from the Space Telescope Science Institute: http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/documents/system-docs/vms-guide/html/VUG_1.html It's got some details for their installation, but might prove a little more approachable if the DEC/Compaq/HP docs aren't doing it for you.

Verrrry interesting! I look forward to the prices coming down for that kit, though an exclusive deal with Apple probably means that's a long way off...

But then:


This is really more what I meant - not that $200 is terrible pricing today, it truly doesn't seem bad, but in absolute terms I'm not sure I want to spend $200 for novelty lighting. And I will keep repeating that to myself...

Yes, yes you did. That's an amazingly sweet deal.

There are some Ultra 20's floating around for under $150, I'm tempted to pick one up just to gut it and transfer the MSI 990FX board that's in an old Lian Li aluminum case now. Don't think it qualifies as a case mod, doesn't look like there's any modding required. But then, that's $150 I don't really need to spend -- or could put towards that Philips Hue lighting kit...

... doesn't seem that bad when non-programmable 5-8 watt LED bulbs are selling for $15-25 each. So if the Zigbee bridge is $50 out of the $200 kit price, $50/bulb for the tri-color programmables isn't that bad relative to current LED bulb pricing.

As for the $9 hot dogs, you have no idea the kind of price inflation we've been seeing in animal snouts, hooves, et cetera !

Interesting - are you using the drive fusion stuff, or just using them as two independent volumes?

Unfortunately Apple pulled the plug on their brief flirtation with ZFS just before Snow Leopard (10.6) was released, IIRC. See these three articles for that story. I should point out that ZFS is apparently useable for "secondary storage," just not by default and not on your system volumes, etc.

Fusion Drive is something different; Apple's basically using software to weld separate SSD and spinning HDD into something better than Seagate's hybrid Momentus SSD+HDD devices . More details from AnandTech or PCMag . My skimming of the explanations make Apple's approach sound more like hierarchical storage management (HSM) applied to the two devices, versus pure caching where the capacity of the cache is "lost" to the end-user. IOW with 1TB of HDD and 128MB of SSD, Apple gives you more like 1.12TB useable storage whereas a hybrid self-contained device would give you 1TB.

Possibly because they see the word "supercomputer." Possibly because they see all the listings on ePay asking for $3k to $30k for a single rack of an Altix system, and don't check the completed auctions... And just maybe because there's a lot of metal and commodity RAM in there.

I tried using VMware's vCenter Converter Standalone to scarf up a Thinkpad T61p w/ XP, but it kept failing during the last phases when it tries to fix up the resulting virtualized image. Maybe because I was including the "extra" partition(s) with boot managers, hibernation image, or whatever. I'll have to try again without those...

Did go ahead and try disk2vhd, which would start so long as I ignored everything but the C: drive. Copying that over to a FreeBSD host now...

Tried to get vCenter Converter to turn the resulting VHD into something else just for kicks, but apparently that's not a supported format.

You must be aware there's a huge issue with abuse of "cousin domains" or "sister domains" -- domains registered deliberately because they look like or are a slight misspelling of a legit domain. My financial sector employer has a portfolio of thousands of these domains, which were either "defensive" registrations, or taken from bad actors during legal proceedings. Not unusual for a large bank to own tens of thousands.

So far I haven't run across any serious attempts to limit what people can do within their domain, like bill.gates.smokes.banana.peels.on.4chan.net, but all it takes is one bored/creative attorney...

PS - If your domain is being abused by phishers, have a look at DMARC - the biggest mailbox providers like MAGY (Microsoft, AOL, Google, and Yahoo), including NetEase in China and Mail.ru in Russia, have implemented DMARC checks to protect their customers. The blocking policies are most useful for larger operations with specifically customer-facing domains, because mailing lists and other forwarding that regular folks do would be impacted. But any domain owner can use it to request reports about what mail the big receivers see using their domain. Interesting stuff, where previously you might not have known that 32,768 messages a day were being sent to GMail using your domain from a particular machine in Romania. So you get that in aggregate reports, and some receivers will send you per-message details like the headers, URLs inside the message, and other interesting stuff if you want it.

The standard is open, and the plan is to turn it over to the IETF later this year.

I got my motorcycle endorsement in Massachusetts, so when I moved I just had to take the written test in California. But digging around a bit...

So it looks like California follows the same practice.

When I go to the homepage of the referenced site and see "Maritime Warfare Centre, in Portsmouth UK" as the home of the program, I kindof understand the concern. But he's probably already set off all the alarm bells by browsing to that site anyway...

Hope somebody adopts their dog and takes care of it, after hamei and Assistant have been detained...

Hey, we've all got more and more bits in our lives. And unless we just close our eyes and trust in The Cloud, we need to answer these questions.

I feel like the quality/reliability of drives is dropping along with the price. If you didn't have the off-site backup I'd definitely be thinking about the more survivable configurations. I guess part of the question is how frequently that off-site is updated, and what is it's drive failure tolerance, age of disks involved, etc.

I've only got a 1U 4-bay external case for my home/office store. While I'm nervously debating prices on the 3 and 4TB drives versus my now ~3 year old 1.5TB drives, I'm wondering if I don't want more bays for the kind of options you mention... One of those SGI/Rackable Omnistor 3016s comes to mind, though I'm not thrilled at running more drives over the same 4 SAS ports. Though if the expander(s) could use the full 6Gbps/channel to the HBA it might be a wash over the situation today, which is drives limited to 3Gb and/or whatever rate they can stream off the platters...

Welcome!

First thing, if you haven't already have a look through the Indigo2 Workstation Owner's Guide . There is a troubleshooting section, and you should make sure there isn't anything there you haven't already tried.

Generally speaking though, the first thing to do with sick SGI machines is hook a terminal/PC up to the first serial port and see what if anything it spits out on power-on. Perhaps you did that when you removed the gfx, perhaps not... There's a section of the Owner's Manual detailing the serial port connections, which are mini-DIN and is compatible with your once-common Mac serial cable. Taken from the old SGI Linux-on-I2 how-to :
(That factoid wasn't in the Neko wiki page for the Indigo2 , guess I'll fix that while I'm up...)

Anyway others might have more specific advise, but it's always a good idea to be able to listen to what these beasts will tell you on their serial ports. Thought I'd get that out while we're waiting for more informed advice.

Again, welcome and enjoy!

Come on hamei, isn't this why we should pony up for the used cisco gear?