IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - Printable Version
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RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - Anonymoose - 07-13-2025
A day of testing, Cyberduck works much better for accessing the FTP server from my Mac. Could someone explain why what I did worked? I’d like to learn from this whole experience.
Another thing, the transfer seems to max at 820-890mb/s, is there a reason? I know the usb Ethernet adapter can do 10mb/s, and Cyberduck has been set to unlimited bandwidth. Any thoughts?
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - weblacky - 07-13-2025
You are an SGI Indy, Yes? Thats 10baseT Ethernet HALF-DUPLEX which is 10Mb/s theoretical Max MegaBITS NOT MegaBYTES.
Are you sure you're reading the units right?
10Mbps (MegaBITS) is equal to 1.125MB/s (MegaBytes) if it was even able to do that...not really...theoretical so call it ~1MBps (MegaBYTES), if that due to lack of FULL-DUPLEX...Indy NIC cannot talk and receive at the same time! So it's even SLOWER than a FULL-DUPLEX 10BaseT ethernet adapter!
Are you sure it's not saying 890 Kb/s? which is 7.12Mbps which is doable for a half-duplex 10Mbps NIC on the Indy! Etherway...yeah 10/100Mb/s Indy cards a kind of rare because everyone wants one (they do come up though)...remember this was like 1993-1995, most people could only buy like have 350MB, 500MB, or rich/server 1GB drives....
The NIC is SLOW, it's meant for documents and personal files like the floppy disk was, it's faster than dial up.
You're thinking of 100Mb ethernet, this is 1/10 of that....
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - vishnu - 07-14-2025
(07-13-2025, 09:42 PM)weblacky Wrote: remember this was like 1993-1995, most people could only buy like have 350MB, 500MB, or rich/server 1GB drives....
I've still got my 1991 IBM PS/2, it came with a 10MB drive that I later upgraded to 40MB. I still use it to practice my blackjack card counting skills against the venerable blackjack game that came with Casino Master Gold, just by a happy coincidence that computer and that blackjack game dealt the cards at just about the exact same speed as well-practiced casino blackjack dealers. I kept a running count in my head and a side count of dealt aces on my feet, just the way the professional blackjack books teach.
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - weblacky - 07-14-2025
I'll admit those were the biggest you could get. Looking at any historical information you can find, that summarizes drives, it looks like every year they were pretty much doubling or better so in 1990 people were getting 40MB-100MB drives in retail consumer stores, but a year later it was more like 150MB/250MB, then a year later it was 350 MB to 500MB, then suddenly 1GB+.
From what I'm reading in a four year time span it went from consumers only being able to get tens to maybe 100 MB to being able to actually get close to a gigabyte in just four years. A couple years after that 4GB to nearly 9 GB drives were available, again at the most top end business prices. But you could get them money not being an object.
I would call that pretty remarkable acceleration in under five years! Obviously the ethernet standard increased by 10 times as well so a system of that generation would've been able to handle it. Obviously SGI didn't put much future proofing into the NIC on the Indy/Indigo(2). The O2 and higher really got that I guess.
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - Anonymoose - 07-14-2025
(07-13-2025, 09:42 PM)weblacky Wrote: You are an SGI Indy, Yes? Thats 10baseT Ethernet HALF-DUPLEX which is 10Mb/s theoretical Max MegaBITS NOT MegaBYTES.Geez, I just checked and it’s actually KB/sec. Could I improve this somehow?
Are you sure you're reading the units right?
10Mbps (MegaBITS) is equal to 1.125MB/s (MegaBytes) if it was even able to do that...not really...theoretical so call it ~1MBps (MegaBYTES), if that due to lack of FULL-DUPLEX...Indy NIC cannot talk and receive at the same time! So it's even SLOWER than a FULL-DUPLEX 10BaseT ethernet adapter!
Are you sure it's not saying 890 Kb/s? which is 7.12Mbps which is doable for a half-duplex 10Mbps NIC on the Indy! Etherway...yeah 10/100Mb/s Indy cards a kind of rare because everyone wants one (they do come up though)...remember this was like 1993-1995, most people could only buy like have 350MB, 500MB, or rich/server 1GB drives....
The NIC is SLOW, it's meant for documents and personal files like the floppy disk was, it's faster than dial up.
You're thinking of 100Mb ethernet, this is 1/10 of that....
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - weblacky - 07-14-2025
Did you actually read what I wrote, above? You are operating at max speed! You're getting just over 7Mb/s on a 10Mb/s port that can only do half duplex.
This machine was made when people used floppy disks that were 1.44 MB with an extra option to use a 20MB Floptical disk drive on Indy. Documents were a few kilobytes. Images were around a megabyte on consumer devices. The networking technology of the time was to transfer these type of files in a collaborative environment. It was rarely expected that you would reload the entire machine and even then having a drive that was over 2 GB in size was never really expected back then. Same with the indigo line of SGI computers.
Half duplex means it cannot talk and receive at the same time. It does one or the other which creates an additional bandwidth impact and slows down the process which means it will never be 10. A full duplex device can talk and receive at the same time, a half duplex device can only do one or the other.
The only way to go faster is to actually get a rare 10/100 Mb card for the Indy that goes in a GIO32 slot. these days they don't come up for sale very often and they are potentially hundreds of dollars.
You're basically transferring a 1.44 floppy drive worth of data every two seconds. That's faster than the floppy drive can right to/fill-up the floppy. So it's faster than using a sneaker net.
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - Anonymoose - 07-14-2025
Oh! You wrote your post with the correction in mind. Alright! Hey, I’ll take anything that’s faster than floppy speeds lol.
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - weblacky - 07-14-2025
There's two different 10/100 cards available for the Indy. One is a Phobos G130 and the other is made with an SGI branding from Set Engineering.
The set engineering model has drivers that come directly in Irix automatically. The Phobos one has third-party drivers.
There's only about 5-ish peripherals for Indy outside of a SCSI adapter, that fit in the GIO32 slots and have a driver. There's Indy video, Cosmo compress, two different 10/100 network cards, the very rare and never seen dual-headed graphics option, and I guess obviously the Nintendo Dev kit.
Personally the problem is if you want the best Indy video import/export options you can't use the high-speed network cards as you need both slots just for the two video solutions that pair together. You can still use the raw video import without the compression and a network card.
I haven't seen one of these network cards appear on any auction sites or anything in nearly ten years. Though obviously one may have slipped by without me noticing though I checked several times a day. 15 years ago they were very common online but still commanded nearly $200 back then. I don't know today what one would sell for as I haven't seen a 10/100Mb Indy NIC for sale in almost a decade.
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - jan-jaap - 07-14-2025
You forgot the GIO32 FDDIXPress board. Drivers included in IRIX
RE: IRIX 5.3 Network Help? - weblacky - 07-14-2025
5-ish, plus I purposely didn't include things like the cyclone printing card and all the other stuff that...
(07-14-2025, 09:02 PM)jan-jaap Wrote: You forgot the GIO32 FDDIXPress board. Drivers included in IRIX