[Equinox]

Hello fellow SGI'ers!

After lurking on what was Nekochan and avidly reading up on Silicon Graphics hardware for many years, I have finally come into possession of two beautiful SGI Octane2's from my university.  I have been restoring them in my free time over the past few weeks: successfully removed the PROM password and got the diagnostic graphics interface to display on my VGA monitor (after trying a few monitors and fiddling with the switches on the "universal" 13W3 to VGA cable I bought).  When I boot IRIX from the diagnostic menu, I see "IRIX 6.5.something" displayed in the lower right corner, some network errors are displayed (something about not being able to reach my Uni's servers to grab DCSLib) and then the screen goes blank! At this point my (Dell) monitor displays an error message that "this video mode is not supported".  I feared SOG issues, but I was confused why the PROM and early boot sequence would display properly if that was the case...  Any ideas? Is this an unusual setmon config that is loaded at boot?  I plan to re-install IRIX over the network (more on that below), so if its just an OS problem, I'm happy.  Don't want to spend hours installing and troubleshooting a network install of IRIX only to find my display is the weak link in the system!

As to the network errors eluded to, I have the Octane connected to my /24, DHCP-supporting home network through the built in RJ-45.  Network light comes up on the switch and everything properly and the machine definitely knows something is plugged in (it throws an error before hitting PROM to check network cable otherwise) but when I attempt to ping anything on the internet or LAN from the PROM command prompt, it simply hangs and does nothing.  I have set appropriate netaddr and netmask environment variables in the PROM before running the ping test -- is this a hardware or (more likely) a configuration fallacy on my part?

Cheers!

[kaigan]

Hello, and welcome!

As far as the display issue goes, it seems likely to me that the IRIX configuration on the systems is simply using a resolution or refresh rate that your monitor doesn't support. If you have a serial or serial to USB cable available, you should be able to get a prompt from the system that way. Assuming you're able to log in as root (or boot the machine to single-user mode), you can use the following command to set the resolution to something your monitor can handle:

Code:

/usr/gfx/setmon -x 1024x768_60

For the network side, IRIX uses a number of configuration files to set its IP address, DNS entries, etc. If the system isn't explicitly configured for DHCP or is looking for it in the wrong place, it won't grab an IP and you won't be able to connect.

The ping command in the PROM on SGI machines uses an outdated echo protocol for ping, instead of the now ubiquitous ICMP echo response. Very few things these days will respond to it properly.

That said, you should be able to get an IRIX network installation going without any issues as long as your environment variables are set correctly. I recommend using Booterizer for the installation: https://github.com/unxmaal/booterizer

If you have any further questions, we're all very happy to help!