• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Who are the silicon graphics enthusiast members here?

Current challenge is an R3K Indigo that I finally got to POST, but either fails soon after with a "CPU Parity" error if I remember correctly, or will immediately fail POST with a "Replace CPU board" message.

It wouldn't/won't POST at all with the Elan board I have, but will with the LG1. I have another chassis with power supply and an unknown condition CPU board, but the machine didn't chime at all when I swapped that board in.
 
Uhmm,
well - i also have quite a few systems; from small to large...

Indy ( including a Challenge S in Indy case, are those rare ?? )
Iris Indigo Elan
O2 with 1600SW
Octane
Onyx Deskside
Indigo2 R10K
Origin 200
Power Challenge 10000XL
Origin 2000 - from desksides to a 4 rack 64 CPU version, the biggest version one can use without a Metarouter which is for use for bigger ( 65+ CPUs ) configs
Altix 4700 - 4 rack config 512 cores 1,6 TB RAM 45 KW Power needed 3,5 metric tons weight

And with the systems i also rescued some docs and media kits on cd...
 
In case this proves useful to anyone with older IRIX systems, here's a nice little bit of hackery to run an installation server on a Linux box. It's not designed for high security, but gets the job done. TLDR; 'sh' on an IRIX install server is expected to be 'ksh', however, renaming or symlinking 'ksh' to 'sh' directly causes a lot of issues. Intercepting and redirecting all the various ways a binary can be executed is a bit of challenge.
 

Attachments

  • sgi_shim.zip
    2.5 KB · Views: 1
snclucas said:
I recently took custody of a few O2s, and this beast. I love SGI/irix but little experience.
Click to expand...



Thumbs up for your rescue...

I'd like also to get my hands on an Onyx2... :)
You will need quite a bit of power to get this up and running.
I assume right next to the system there is another SGI rack with f.e. storage ? - And did you get this also ?
You should find some docs online imo. There have been some things saved from the former SGI site including user guides.
Eventually bitsavers has something, and there is the irix7 site which may also help.

Have fun with the system !

For a start i would disconnect the graphics system to see if the normal cpu system is coming up and still running.
Did you also get the key with it and do you know when it has been powered on last time ?
 
Pete shutting down Nekochan was a gut punch, and I didn't need the drama around the replacement(s). The quality of the former only made the latter less attractive. But glad to see some handles I recognize in this thread, and run into some folks recently at VCF West.

I spent a lot of time discussing and documenting installation processes, configurations and options, alternate parts and part numbers, etc, in the forums and on the wiki. Putting together the last supported OS installation w/ ProPacks for Altix 3/4 stands out. Anyway, I'm glad some things were recovered (cf. the Nekonomicon).

I did recently get an O2 running that had been non-op. But I can't imagine putting the kind of time into it that I used to do pre-2018.
 
smj said:
Pete shutting down Nekochan was a gut punch, and I didn't need the drama around the replacement(s). The quality of the former only made the latter less attractive. But glad to see some handles I recognize in this thread, and run into some folks recently at VCF West.

I spent a lot of time discussing and documenting installation processes, configurations and options, alternate parts and part numbers, etc, in the forums and on the wiki. Putting together the last supported OS installation w/ ProPacks for Altix 3/4 stands out. Anyway, I'm glad some things were recovered (cf. the Nekonomicon).

I did recently get an O2 running that had been non-op. But I can't imagine putting the kind of time into it that I used to do pre-2018.
Click to expand...
Very nice what was the issue with the o2
 
siliboi said:
Very nice what was the issue with the o2
Click to expand...
Not sure, to be honest. I had received a complete unit "untested," which wouldn't power up. I got an additional PSU, made no difference. Got another system board (still R5k), still wouldn't power up. Set it aside for a year plus.

A couple weeks ago I missed out on a trade for a different (running) O2. That, and a question from a boy named Sue about what parts I needed, prompted me to drag out the bits I had and before I knew it I was iterating through the combinations. This time, one of the combinations worked. Now that system board works with either PSU. 🤷

Diags from the Installation Tools disc look good, and I (finally) received a disk caddy. Now I'll have to think about what kind of HDD I'd want in there long term, whether to install 6.5.22 or 6.5.30, etc. It or a Fuel ought to find a place in my office.
 
NeXT said:
U121. It's a 74F38 quad 2-input NAND buffer. We have not fixed it yet, hence why I'm sending a system out that is just as dead but does not have a cratered chip. We'll compare to see if it too is blown internally.
Click to expand...
hey on the other non cratered chips did that fix it? I'm just about to test my gates with a breadboard. I've never tested a nand gate but im supposing according to some guides a led and multimeter should be sufficient
 
Gave it to them. Suspect bad PSU killing logic boards, no skins, an optical drive in questionable condition and a bad logic board they wanted to investigate. It was not a showpiece machine.
 
I have a couple of O2's, one Indigo2 IMPACT, and have access to a 30CPU 54GB Altix 350, a 4CPU Altix 3700, and a 20CPU Altix 3700. Rebuilt CentOS 5 from source on the Altix 350 ten years ago. Been a long time since any of them have been run. Both O2's are intact.
 
NeXT said:
Silicon Graphics only became trendy in the last five years. I don't blame Clint for this. They're pretty, many of them are fragile, they can run some neato modern software, there was that Nintendo partnership for a while and they are maturing in value at a staggering rate.
Click to expand...

I'm convinced that sgi collectors are really rare and far between. But it's rather the lack of places to find this stuff is the problem, and the fact that existing legacy installations that still use sgi hardware are not cost sensitive so you have listings going for huge amounts of money targeted to that user base. Not necessarily for the enthusiast to buy.


Same with most unix workstations. I feel like most people in the vintage PC/Mac communities have no idea we exist and you'd be hard pressed to find someone willing to pay $$$$ for a Sun Ultra 5, for instance.
 
SGI saw its uses in high-performance and rapidly innovating environments. Those of us who were buying machines left and right in the 2000's were doing so as universities, game developers and television/cinema production houses were decommissioning them and save for a few top-spec machines where the resale value was sustained by companies who were going to hold out for another decade, once that burst of surplus happened, they were gone. At one point in the mid-2000's there was a member on Nekochan who had bought a tall skid of Octane's on surplus for only a few hundred dollars and he did build one nice machine and sell a few others but the rest stayed on a skid and were left out in the snow and there was pictures of him digging machines out in one thread. The other like I mentioned was that once Irix fell out of everyday use a lot of the folks who were interested in SGI moved on. The last few years of Nekochan reminds me of a few forums I've watched over the years as the regular users died off. Some subforums might see a new post once a month.
 
It was with great sadness that I passed on my SGI collection a few years back. Running out of room here and the 80s/90s Unix workstations were taking a fair share of cubic volume.
 
I used to have quite a few systems many years ago, an Onyx Deskside, three Indigo 2 (two purple one teal), a couple of Indys (I still have one) and an Octane.
Over the years I sold all of them due to international relocations, and never recovered, too many competing hobbies/interests.
Nowadays I am back to looking for a Deskside Onyx, as I have some unfinished business with it (I was a games developer at the era of the Nintendo 64 AND I worked at SGI later in the early 2000s)...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top