[weblacky]

All SGI machines have a default SCSI ID they want to boot from, normally ID1.

I'm simply saying I don't mess with that. I put the proper drive in the proper slot with the proper ID setting to be the booting system drive, where the default settings in the firmware work just fine. Some people will start playing games where instead of putting the drive in the correct place with the correct settings they'll simply alter the settings in the firmware to get it to boot. Then when they lose those settings due to a due to a failed real time clock battery or something similar the system will re-initialize default parameters and then nothing boots properly.

If you're taking an octane, you're buying a real drive off eBay. Current available SCSI to SD card virtualization are not fast enough. However the octane uses an SCA 80 connector on an ultra wide SE bus. Those drives are readily available and not expensive. You shouldn't spend $150 for that drive. You should definitely spend $100 or less shipped for a good quality drive. Look around the forums for recommendations but the octane and the O2 are systems that natively take hot-swap style connections which are the most popular because of old data centers. That's not to say you can swap the drives into the SGI, you definitely cannot hot swap drives in an SGI chassis.

Current SD card emulation is perfect for indigo, Indy, potentially indigo2. For faster systems the speed is not yet there as demonstrated by several forum members that like to performance clock these things.

Also the current SD card boards are narrow SCSI and not ultra wide SCSI. While you could convert them it means that you'd have a whole bunch of adapters and cables hung off your octane that would also be slower than needed. For a price less than the cost of that ZuluSCSI board you could have a faster working hard drive off eBay, no problem.

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/parts...html#DISKS

Octane can take anything with an SCA 80 connector however some drives run hotter than others. Later model drives run cooler and slower speed drives run cooler. I would refrain from putting a 15 KRPM drive in this machine.

You don't have to follow this above list exhaustively, it's simply a guideline. The vast majority of newer drives with the same connector that are ultra 160, ultra 320 are normally backwards compliant and can turn into an SE Ultra Wide Drive.


I'm still run things old-school and tend to install using CD's but I just haven't had the wherewithal to break out the infrastructure to do network installs lately. But I would recommend if you don't have the equipment and the files on CD then definitely network installers are only other way to go and it's also going to be consistently faster anyway.

There have been several forum members who have created network install virtual machines or applications that allow you to use non-SGI platforms to do network installs. The newest one is called LOVE: http://contrib.irixnet.org/truhobbyist/love/1.0.0/

Lastly your question about the serial terminals. So a lot of UNIX machines do this, but basically when your SGI becomes horribly upset it may not display anything at all on your main monitor. It may make a chiming noise, it may start its fans, but the main monitor will simply remain blank for turn itself off. In those circumstances the only way to talk to your SGI is through a serial terminal. Traditionally this is a properly wired null modem serial cable attached to a laptop or other Windows PC running a terminal emulator like teraterm or if you're using an old Windows XP PC - hyperterm.

There you'll see prom/firmware output as the system is booting along with verbose descriptions and complaints should something go wrong. When SGI's are configured in a certain mode they'll automatically start a terminal for you if they successfully can boot themselves all the way to their own firmware. They'll give you a text prompt for the firmware interface and menu. If you can start your entire OS you'll get an OS terminal instead if you boot all the way through.

The majority of the time you can leave everything hooked up and you should at least see serial output but you may not get the terminal interaction. Sometimes you have to remove your keyboard and mouse from the SGI to give it a hint that you in fact want operate it through a serial terminal instead of through its peripherals. So sometimes a little nudge is necessary to get the terminal interface that's interactive. In all situations though I believe you should be able to get the terminal that's at least descriptive as it's booting. But that might vary.


So the serial cable is useful in examples of extreme upset by the system. This is normally a hardware level problem or complaint and not a software one. Normally you should be able to boot into the graphical prom on the main monitor and use your keyboard and mouse in the proms terminal to reinstall an operating system or change boot parameters and things like that. But if somebody has messed with the monitor resolution in certain prom systems or if you don't have a compatible monitor, or the system board doesn't pass full diagnostics in which case the main graphic interface will never come up, you'll need the serial cable and need to know how to use the terminal in order to discover what might be wrong.


I hope those answered your three questions.