[weblacky]

Well let me clear up a little confusion. I didn't say that RPM sucks, I just said that I don't use it and I'm not involved in that.

And generally when it comes to the software installers, that's correct you don't get to choose where it gets installed it tends to go into a very limited set of areas.

Normally it's the purview of the installers to even give you the option. The fact is a lot of things can break when you move program files around as they depend on both relative position and sometimes absolute position for libraries to work in certain paths to be found. So that is just the way of the beast.


In terms of cloning I think Ian had a guide but I've never actually done it before again I'm not a software guy. There is an SGI back up and restore official method. There's also a xfsrestore tool. You may have to do some research to find out which one works best for you.


Remember with a working a booting SGI, just like in windows, you can create option and root drives all you want. So you can prep a new drive for another system on another SGI just by partitioning it and sidestepping the whole FX step when you go to set up the next SGI.


If I remember my general steps, which you basically do is you would format the drive usually of a similar size but XFS can shrink and grow. It is one of its advanced capabilities. You may be able to get the drive of your dreams all set up. Then shrink down the file system inside the partition as low as it will go. Then use something like xfsrestore and it's back up mate to create a backup then partition a new disk that has enough space for that shrunken XFS volume. Then go ahead and restore the XFS filesystem and grow it to size the new disk then use a tool called dvhtool to place the miniroot and several other files in a special header region of the hard drive that's used by the prom to boot as well as for some optional diagnostics and a kernel image. I believe that's the basics of it.

SGI actually had some really cool development tools. There is a rapid app graphical development tool as well as a couple different compilers for a few different languages.

If you want to use that from the start you'll need to insert the IRX 6.5 development libraries discs along with the foundation one and two discs when you do your installation. They're required before you can add the development products.

Lastly let me clear up something about the whole FTP thing. I'm not saying FTP is the best thing to use I said that FTP is installed by default. So an FTP service to your users home directory will already be up and running for you after you install the operating system. It's the easiest way to get started is what I specifically said. I would personally keep the FTP in place for quick final transfers but probably use something like NFS Longer term.


I would avoid Samba because obviously that Samba is so old that it may not operate well with today's windows. You're talking SMB v1 protocol, which Microsoft has taken great pains to disable or even cripple in Windows 10 and Windows 11. It's not worth your time. Especially when Windows has NFS services under its optional windows feature.


Windows has had some version of UNIX services for over a two decades. And I just confirmed online that yes a client for NFS is available for Windows 11 and Windows 10 in the optional features. Though you may have to have the professional edition of Windows 11 or 10 to do it, I didn't check for home edition. 


But NFS would be the smarter route if you can get it to work. I'm just saying that FTP works immediately right after the Irix installation is complete, with no need to fiddle around. And you're going to need a way to get those files in and out of the machine especially if you're not using an entire CD set with all the products on CDs with a functioning CD drive.  FTP is simply the fastest and easiest way to do it during the initial parts of set up when you're learning the operating system.


But installing the NFS bits in Irix is just fine and its commands are the same as any other NFS server so that's not necessarily the problem. It's just that you won't have the NFS server bits after install and you'll need to get those product files onto the machine to run them in the software installer. Again FTP is the best way to just get the files onto the octane.

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In terms of what I use them for...nothing...sorry to say.  My story is a little unusual compared to a lot of people here. A lot of people on the forums actually got the opportunity to use an SGI in their work life or during schooling.  They have fond memories of sitting in front of it and opening the one program that they used all day and went ahead and made professional movie graphics or whatever they did. Unfortunately I didn't get such an opportunity I was introduced SGIs from a family member via an aerospace "take your child to work day back" in the mid 90s.  I was barely old enough to qualify. Had I been a year older I apparently wouldn't be considered a child even though I was still barely a teenager.

I took a very memorable multi-hour tour through the Black ops area for the JSF program at Boeing. This was what you now know as the F35, Boeing handed over all their work on it when Lockhead Martin won the contract, the plane Boeing was developing looks incredibly visually similar to the images and drawings I saw back in the mid 90s...

Anyway Boeing either use to or still uses, I don't know anymore, a CAD program called CATIA and back then it was available on SGI Irix and I don't believe it was available on any kind of windows machine at the time.  Every cubicle had a huge purple impact Indigo2 on it along with a 3D spaceball in order to model the parts and the assembly of the plane.

Their area had a conference room had a Deskside Onyx hooked to a CRT projector. The family member showing me around didn't know any of the specifications so unfortunately I don't either but they did demonstrate that what they used it for was doing fly through of the assembled aircraft during their meetings. So they kept the system on all the time and they were just loaded up the latest assembly from their file server and within a minute they were able to do cross-sections and do relatively realtime fly throughs of the entire assembled craft from all the assembly files and parts for that aircraft. The aircraft I believe he showed me was something like an airliner and not the fighter prototype of the time.

I had been into your basic DOS/Windows computers for about three years before that and so I've never heard of any of this stuff and of course it looks awesome so you can imagine that to young me it was pretty cool.

I managed to get an off lease indigo2 high impact R4400 for about $800 in 1998 which was about 2 to 3 years after my first exposure on that trip to Boeing.  Ever since then I've been collecting SGI's. Obviously when I got my first couple stations I did what you're doing which is to learn a bunch about the operating system and compile stuff and play around with the open source software which back then was actually pretty current. We are talking pre-2000 here.

But once I got into basically college and passed the time to fool around with these things was just gone. Yes I can appreciate what I learned and what they taught me but really what I love about them is what they represented history and how they look. To me they're works of art just as I mentioned the vintage supercar sort of analogy. With the amount they cost and how technology has moved on it's a very apt analogy.

So my collection is always in my view, it's all around my office and around where I spend most of my day. I look at them every day. But booting them well....not so much.

And that lead into my more recent endeavor. People on the forums know me more as someone who is interested in the hardware. Not because I'm an electrical engineer, I'm certainly not, it's because I have a very large collection. The icons on the bottom by signature aren't for show. They represent systems I actually own. So I own that many systems not including various parts and duplicates of various things. It's a fairly sizable collection for one individual. But I've never been forced to get rid of it and so I've been constantly collecting since 1998. You used to get a good collecting opportunity every 5 to 7 years but once 2013 kind of struck and that was the end of the mass purging of most businesses for SGI hardware, things started dry up fast. My last big buying opportunity was 2019. And I've had some small buying opportunities in the intervening years but it's been slim Pickens.

After you have a collection that's been sitting on a shelf for 20+ years you realize that if you actually attempted to start most of them they would explode. Then you come to the realization that they worked when you put them away but you haven't actually done anything with them for 20+ years. So you have two options, you can either rebuild them and become proficient in that or you can sell them as is as wall trophies and warn someone never to start them or they may explode.

My collection was basically rotting on the shelf. Granted I have some mint looking systems. They haven't literally had to move in 20 years and they were mint what I got them. With the collapse of Nekochan, the old SGI haunt for over a decade, there was a massive loss of community and information and we all kind of drifted around. By sheer luck I ran into this site back in 2018, I believe?

I found a lot of the same usernames from Nekochan had found it recently as well and was delighted to see that people were once again attempting to re-publish and put back everything that we lost with the old site. Many of us were old timers of it and so we either had read the information ourselves or we had saved some of it in our heads and we're trying to get the most valuable stuff back out. Along with that came the need for parts and repair, and that's where I decided to step up.

While hopefully there's more to come I'm currently working on putting together a workflow to create a repair service for desktop SGI's that I own.  With, hopefully later, expansion into big iron, mini-fridge sized, SGI systems if I'm able to procure any of them in my home state.

You see the collector community initially shrank but it's actually growing with new young people still interested in the platform. And obviously the systems were made to network so you can still network them, they still have some basic utility, the emulation isn't really there so you can't experience the full software through emulation alone.  And so physical machines are in demand. I would say some of that demand has simply maintained the same value with inflation as it is. Some of it has gone geometric as apparently some of the later systems are still secretly in use by entities around the world and so we actually fight a shadow group of people who are also hoarding and gobbling up expensive parts for the last and greatest SGI models made. They don't care about octane of course. But they very much care about Fuel & Tezro along with some of the larger rackmount style systems.

I decided learn repair using my own collection and slowly attempt to refurbish them. I've been doing hands-on electronic electronics rebuilding for appliances for a few years before that. So I had most of the physical tools you need to do 80% of the work. Obviously if you own the vintage supercar in the garage it doesn't look very good if you can't start the engine and run it around the block every so often. But mine basically sat and rotted.

So I'm involved in the repair and refurbishment of SGI parts and systems. It's still in its infancy as I only really began this endeavor two years ago. I offer a few things publicly but I need to conduct more research and dedicate funds and space, which I'm currently doing, to expanding that to service all major power supplies for SGI desktop systems as well as refurbished motherboard and graphics cards.

There's no new inventory coming online, we haven't found a warehouse full of these things in quite a while. Either they're in the hands of dealers or there sometimes in the closets of people who have the systems in their homes but haven't used them or they broke years ago and they have no way to get them repaired.

So the long answer to your question is, I repair and enjoy SGIs, visually.  I loaded Irix on them and make sure they run and they appear to be stable and then I shut them down and I'm done. I'm not going to do all the software stuff because we're just too far apart than we were. 20 years ago we weren't so far apart and the systems were fun to use and you learned a lot about UNIX and things like that. I did a lot of that stuff and so it's done for me. I value them as both a collection and as history but I have no real pull to use one in any great capacity to do any specific thing. As I said I don't have memories of using them for doing work or anything like that. I've always just been a collector so that's essentially what I am.

Like I said the opportunities don't come along that often anymore, unless of course you want to mail order stuff, which I don't. I try to pick up stuff locally within the state and given the state I'm in had major aerospace as well as university and national laboratory presence in it SGIs used to be pretty plentiful. Also being on the West Coast SGI was heavily used all over the West Coast of the United States. But again I'm talking 20+ years ago now. So these days I barely run across a collector with an Indy or a guy who has a barn full of indigo's.

I enjoy repairing things in general and I still love the way these things look. I enjoy seeing new collectors get access to them and the excitement because I remember that for me.

Hopefully I'll have some announcements in the future about opening new repair services, as it stands I have no new adventures to tell until I can overcome my current hurdles and reach my next milestones.