[Raion]

Thankfully none of that applies to me. I don't use other OSes to interface with my SGIs. Thankfully I've discovered all of the ways to hack around not having another machine. Backing up, servicing, etc. I can all perform without having a SCSI capable PC. Plus, with Windows unable to read XFS, I guess I don't see any relevance for my applications.

That all said, it sounds like a depressing loss. At least MS isn't gonna shut it down like with Windows XP or anything; so legacy use can still happen, probably behind intranets.

[weblacky]

Well Irix can read and write other file systems, like FAT and some UDF.

So someone might be able to say read and write a small hard disk or a ZIP drive or other like device then power down there SGI, hook it up to their PC, and read the resulting data or vice versa.

I agree that once you get all the updates and config’s that a network solution would be best. But I’ve often had trouble with a freshly loaded SGI machine basically still not really supporting much of anything with a modern version of windows or MacOS right in front of you as your only other machine.

As you know SSH has pretty much become incompatible due to age as well as SMB support. If you had setup FTP IIS in windows I guess that’s the first thing you could get going.

[commodorejohn]

Once I went FTP for local file transfer to vintage computers, I never looked back. Obviously it takes some doing just to get, say, an Amiga loaded up with a functional network stack to begin with, but pretty much anything in the '90s workstation world can do TCP/IP and FTP right out of the box.

[Raion]

Yeah I always use NFS or FTP. Works everytime.

[weblacky]

Funny you should mention NFS, used v3 NFS on 6.5.19 on an Indigo2 R10K Impact recently with MacBook Pro running Mojave MacOS worked great for 12 minutes and the Irix kernel started experiencing repeated OOPS and station crashes in network stack.

If the transfer size was small, everything worked, if the file was larger than 12MB Irix crashes (took 20 minutes to find the repeatable examples). So I had to split large files and merge them back to keep most of the crashes from happening. But still had crashes.

However it was unclear if the inst manager had installed the cd version or the newer NFS v3 entitlement from patch CD set. Had to switch to ftp after that.

Hopefully I can test it in the future and really determine what the situation was.

[Raion]

NFSv3 is buggy if you try using it with Linux or macOS. I've had a lot of luck with FreeBSD, other IRIX, and illumos/Solaris.

[jan-jaap]

I keep anything other than working and scratch data on a (Linux) server. There are some problems with old IRIX clients (IRIX 6.2 w/o patch sets comes to mind) in combination with a Linux NFS server (it can 'forget' cwd), but in general it works fine. Of course NFS v3 is a bit of a disaster when it comes to security, but my IRIX systems are on a special VLAN where old and insecure protocols are allowed.

The same server supports SMB for Windows and MacOS clients which makes exchanging files easy. Before I had a server (this is many years ago), I never knew where to look for files, which were invariably on a system which wasn't powered up.

Files on the server are backed up. I only occasionally make backups of workstations, if at all.

At work I still have a couple of instances of Windows 7. It's the last version that can be used as a development host for a whole lot of vxWorks versions, and even that is a hack because WindRiver doesn't support that past Windows XP I believe.