[echo]

that was really great of you to write all that for me, thanks so much, i saved it to a file.
i have been looking all over for info like this and didn't find it talked about anywhere.

i knew that you can't make assumptions about anything for these systems, but some of this takes the cake.
lots of unexpected and weird quirky proprietary things.

i don't want to be annoying by asking too many difficult to answer questions when its mostly just you answering weblacky.
so i apologize if i have taken up too much of your time with it.

i will try to ask easier questions where you don't have to type as much, if its too much just say so.
i have questions about software that i think is better in its own thread, maybe people will want to read about just that one topic.
this thread is for stuff nobody else will care about reading so i don't clog up the forum with too many threads of noob questions.

[weblacky]

You're more than welcome for the private message. It's all about spreading around the good fortune. So obviously when you know the answer help others who come to you.

Yeah, I'm not your software guy. Operating system I'm fairly OK with but in terms of the third-party applications of what people use and what works and what doesn't I'm not your guy.

What I probably advise you to do is to read the forms pretty well first because we have a mega commercial software thread going we also have a few other things and basically know that there's your primary 3D modelers, CAD, and Video effects systems are then there's a series of Adobe systems applications that you'll probably want. There's one famous Windows emulator for Windows 95 potentially upgradable to Windows 98, I don't remember, that you'll probably want.

You'll also want to know information regarding customizing your desktop like the settings backgrounds (terminal operation... no GUI for that!) and adding elements to your menu system and things of that nature. FAQs and searching for those terms should reveal the answers to those.

Please be aware that the forums here exist in kind of "on the fence" area where we don't really outwardly talk about where to get the software it's more what used to run and what is kind of "gettable" now. So obviously someone will be around to slap your hand if you're too far over the fence.

A few members run some software archive sites and they can PM if they feel comfortable showing their archives. Development libraries are much more open because again they're more platform only and not third-party. So if you're someone is interested in getting compilers and all that going, which is its own challenges and has its own groups, there's a neighborhood for that as well. Please note that there is no automated HTTP driven get package style manager for SGI.

There is a group that has gotten the RPM package manager to work on Irix and so the other SGI group on http://sgi.sh does a lot of that kind of stuff and you'd want to go over there to figure out how that all goes, if you're interested. I stay away from all that myself.

There is a very old freeware OSS archive from an old site called NekoChan that we sometimes talk about because a lot of of us used to visit it before it collapsed, that had an integral native SGI tardist series of open source applications from circa 2003 to maybe about 2008 or so? Somebody can correct me on the finalization date. Those used to be the best go to open source packages back in the day. There is a movement of people trying to update that whole load of work but I don't know what the current status of any of that is.

Most installable packages are not going let you choose where to install them. The process is entirely automated. It's not like running make and specifying some sort of installation prefix. So once you're comfortable with your operating system you have two basic choices. You can either attempt to clone it to a much larger disk now that you're comfortable with not needing to erase the disk and reload it when you mess up or you can use an option disc and mount it into the various regions that the files exist in that you would care about like your home directory. I'm not sure how much space the mass installation of every goodie known to man would take up on an SGI.

While you should create a list of what you're interested in and start looking around for that, archive.org has a surprising amount of SGI stuff starting from about 10 years ago by the way. You should concentrate on making sure you understand the octane manual and all the warnings associated with it. That you familiarize yourself with YouTube videos showing Irix's installation as well as the instructions I've included from Ian's SGI depot about that.

And you need to find all the mods and hacks to customize the desktop including the mod to make a scroll mouse wheel work and things of that nature.

Also there is a command called chkconfig that turns off a lot of major services. There's a lot of excess services that are going slow down your machine, ESP is one of them, that you'll want to disable to get back runtime. Look up that as well: https://software.majix.org/irix/admin-chkconfig.shtml

In terms of transferring files to and from your new system, FTP is normally started on SGI's when you install them. Enabling the FTP and simply using it to get files in and out of your SGI to your normal modern computer is going to be your easiest and fastest way to go. There have been people who have been working on newer SSH installs so that they actually agree with the newest cipher but I'm not up on all that and so I can't participate in that conversation. Internally I would just use FTP and get over with it. For the most part NFS can be stable under most situations but you have to install it in a very carefully using your overlays disks as well to make sure you don't install it wrong because else you get a lot of crashes and you won't know why. But NFS did generally work the last time I used it with like macOS but that was 10 years ago. So take that with a grain of salt.

I'll also say that just like modern computers when you keep an SGI plugged into the wall it's going to produce a 5 V standby voltage all the time which is still something you'll need to watch out for is the power supply ages. So I would personally recommend after you get your RTC figured out that you have some sort of switched power strip or you just don't leave it plugged in when you're not using it.

Just my two cents I'm finishing off where you might want to go.

[echo]

all of that is good to know, and i wouldn't have thought to ask about.
this is all things nobody talks about and have probably learned the hard way over time.

i did find all the technical papers and usermanuals for sgi on a website as pdf files so i have read thru the octane manual and some others.

how do you suggest to clone the disk? from the sgi itself or do you pull the hdd and mount it to your pc?
i need to get a scsi card and a ext drive caddy if its really better to pull the hdd for maint and things.

RPM package manager sucks that badly? you can't even pick the drive where it installs to?

you saying FTP is the best way to move files is pretty suprising to me. i thought sgi supports samba for sharing files.
i was planning to set up a shared folder on a windows machine that the sgi can access.

i put my new thread here, it's asking about the freeware and nekoware.
https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4403.html

because i notice a lot of sgi sellers including ian are asking if you want to install gigs and gigs of that stuff to your hdd.
i don't tend to do that, i consider it bloat. much better to pick your own stuff of what you need.

i'm interested in 3d modelling/animation/compositing its all commercial stuff that i used to use on sgi.
i won't ask about it, but luckily i found a small amount of it already.

i'm also interested in programming, which is something i never did on sgi so i don't know what they use for this.
plain c, c++ with qt api, java with javaFX api, java with swing api, are what i know how to use.
wonder if any IDE for sgi exists or if they just use vim and emacs for that like a primitive caveman

i'm curious, what do you use your sgi for?
are you are a programmer, or do you just compile existing stuff?

[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.

---

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.

[echo]

my old school was in hollywood ca, they had hundreds of sgi of all kinds and big iron ones too, but they would have got rid of them a long time ago, RIP.
it was part of a working film studio.
i'm pretty sure they moved to using HP workstations and servers, because they had HP alongside the sgis even back then.
and now sgi is HP, which is kind of ironic.

i'm glad you mentioned NFS, never heard of it before, i'll have to investigate it.

i have heard that sgi do not use any electrolytic caps, they're all tantalum, so no leaking to worry about.
and the power supplies should not need rebuilding for a long time, but if it does need rebuilt then they are a nightmare of complexity.
it might have been you who wrote about it in that thread.

the other day i was wondering if these mips cpu had the heatsink pasted or soldered on, and i saw a guy take one apart on youtube and it was a thermal pad.
he scraped his pad off and put paste there, but it looked like a crap job. so i am guessing thats actually a bad idea to try and do it.
when left alone, you don't need to worry about paste going bad. one less thing to worry about.
but has anybody done this and took temps before and after to see?

so since they're built fairly good, what would blow up after long term storage?
the hdd? some caps in the psu?

i have a pentium3 workstation that i haven't turned on in 20+ years.
i spent a TON of money on it when it was new. as much as it did cost, it was way less than a sgi.
and its almost identical in specs to an octane. so i'd like to try running it again someday.
what would you say to do before trying to power it up?

i have seen comments from people when tezro came out, and they were not impressed.
comments were: same old cpu, same old vpro, its not innovating enough.
they wanted ati firepro or nvidia quadro graphics in it instead, and thought pentium was better than mips.
public comments like that may be why sgi wanted to switch away from mips after tezro.
but those comments weren't from actual sgi customers... they shouldn't have listened.

or maybe mips really wasn't able to compete with pentium anymore.
i have seen benchmarks for tezro from Irinikus and it is twice as fast as octane if you have twice the amount of cpus.
this makes me think a dual cpu tezro won't beat an octane if they have the same cpu's and vpro model, they'd be nearly identical.
customers wouldn't have had much reason to upgrade unless they could afford the extra cpus for $$$
and whats your next buy beyond it? a pentium made by sgi which is identical to every other pentium system, but probably costs more money.
one that can't run your old software either, or irix. they flushed the company right down the toilet by doing that.

anybody buying sgi today for business uses has to be really stupid! its only good for collectors. they need to move on to modern hardware.
you'd probably have to buy tons of refrigerator sized sgi racks to match a modern computer, huge waste of money.
have you seen where Irinikus benchmarks all the sgi's to his mac pros? its on his youtube, was interesting to see.

[weblacky]

For the most part my understanding is that any serious customers left on SGI's are basically running some sort of custom application solution that for one reason or another they're just isn't worth attempting to rewrite or they don't have the license to access the source code and it's a product that was dead-ended. We have also heard of some appliances or solution systems that used SGI's as part of their basic functionality that then to keep going requires you to keep the associated station going. We've heard talks of highly specialized printing and textile looms using Indy, O2, and Octanes.

I've heard of certain type of pick and place systems using a basic form of computer vision from the early 2000s that utilized the last SGI's as part of the appliance. When you're talking about something with $20,000 or $30,000 to replace at the same functionality it's still worth a couple thousand dollars to continually replacing parts of each SGI as it fails versus trying to replace the entire machine.

I've been led to believe that all the old simulators for flight or trucking or thereabouts have been replaced these days and that nobody is running the old simulators on Onyx with multi headed projectors for certifications anymore.


There's also old medical imaging machines that used SGI's for volumetric rendering of their scans into the various files and 3D representations/models. You don't see those much in the United States but a lot of those systems were re-sold on the secondary market and you hear about them overseas or in very remote hospitals that give basic MRI or PET scan ability even if the resolution isn't as sharp as today's they at least have something on site to help people. And to keep the certification and functionality they have to again repair the stations that come with the imaging appliance.

I have heard whispers of a few hush-hush entities that are still running cluster style systems with video processing that are meant to perform an assistive function of some kind that renders data from an older infrastructure or older form of public utility data.

Again most of it is economically based in that it's simply cheaper to keep it going. But a small sliver of it is either dead-ended product where there is no feasible replacement made by a company or entity at this time or it was a custom application and the source code has since been lost. Where it would have to be rewritten from the ground up and it's been determined that either while they're attempting or while they're thinking about that they're still running the old infrastructures.



In terms of capacitors I'm afraid you're a little bit mistaken based on the generation of machine. Indy mainboards for a fact had tantalum capacitors which have a pretty low failure rate although if you feed them bad or very very unstable power they have a tendency to sizzle and burn.

Indigo2 starts to show quite a bit of electrolytic caps, specially in the GIO64 back backplane module and gently sprinkled throughout the motherboard. Though again we haven't seen many failures lately but I expect to based on its age coming up and the inability to get rebuilt power supplies at the moment.

Now Octane and fuel and Tezro are all part of the next generation of circuitry. They all use a modern component process and the company started to use very advanced components for the day. One of the things they did on these three systems was used polymer capacitors and solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors. These are all capacitors that wouldn't normally leak and have an interesting benefit when compared to your common electrolytic wet capacitors.

However SGI never designed any power supplies. Every single power supply on every single SGI I've ever seen no matter the system was somebody else's design and normally carry lots and lots of electrolytic capacitors. To that end that's usually the primary failure point of any system to start with. Electrolytic capacitors aren't really designed to last more than about 12 to 15 years of constant use. They actually start to age faster when left on the shelf after a two year period according to online military research papers describing the problem of accelerated aging in storage. That's why rotating inventory and powering it on for a certain period to help keep the capacitors in good health is actually now a recommended procedure.

Of course that's not gonna magically heal something that's been in storage for 10 years. By then it may not even be safe to attempt the power on and a simply require a rebuild.

So that's the power supply is the first line of attack that needs to happen. A power supply giving bad power either in the form of ripple or the form of unstable voltage causes all the other parts in the system to work harder. They don't want to do that and so older components then start to fail out in catastrophic ways because the power you're feeding them Isn't really to their liking and they are no longer young enough to do that hard work to tolerate that kind of power anymore. Hence you have ceramic caps and things like that starting to go.

In the end Octane has the highest number of capacitors on the motherboard that I've ever seen in a desktop SGI. Yes they're not going to leak because they're not a liquid chemistry. So SGI did purposely choose the chemistry in attempt to stay off these types of failures But even polymer caps are not designed to be used for 20 years. They have a known lifespan because they tend to be worked pretty hard especially in power applications.


That's not to say that every capacitor in every place on an SGI motherboard has an equal chance of failure. But as I've recently been dealing with fuel motherboards and a few others they have voltage regulation module regions on their boards and some of them work very hard and so the failure profile is often the polymer caps in those regions go short and taking out the entire VRM, and sometimes a few things attached to it.


So while I would agree that SGI's are commonly very well made for their day and their price did reflect that. It's not the same as simpler z80 home computers from the 1980s where they could get away with simpler solid-state components at low power. A lot of times when you're dealing with lots of electrical current you tend to need a lot of filtering in it at various stages and electrolytic caps are the cheapest easiest way to perform that. That's just the nature of the beast.


Normally an old power supply tips the scale and takes out itself and a motherboard. Often times the motherboard survives but a certain percentage they don't and require component level repair.

They obviously made the power supplies all custom sizes until the very last line of SGI stations because they wanted to sell power supplies as part of their revenue stream. But now that they don't exist anymore you can't just pop down to the local store and have a hope of getting a power supply that's going to work in an octane, it's like a piece of medical equipment, it has its own power supply and its own constraints and now you have to deal with that.


The system might've been designed well but the power supplies weren't that much better other than being high-end and having as much intelligence as they could for the day they were built. They tend to have a lot of passives to create logic in the older power supplies including octane. Once you get to stuff that's a little more modern it starts looking like a power supply you would get into one of today's computers where everything is been consolidated into just a few chips With a bunch of regulation.

Every single SGI power supply has somebody else's name on it and they weren't designed by SGI.

I would assume if you're a collector that keeps their SGI on the shelf you should be buying a rebuilt power supply every 10 years or so. If you're someone that uses it for shall we say a few hours every quarter of the year then I would say you might actually be able to go 12 to 13 years with some confidence between intervals of buying rebuilt power supplies.


The motherboard capacitors are somewhat similar. But I would guess the same interval roughly.


The bigger issue on octane is the amount of heat. It's one of the hottest systems I know and that stresses the components quite a bit. My expectation of octane peripherals that use electrolytic caps would be definitely to have them replaced every decade and we're not really sure about octane graphics at the moment. It's been proven that the older graphics cards have an enhanced survivability compared to the Vpro line of graphics cards on octane.


We've seen a lot of broken solder joints due to thermal expansion as well as just having odd graphical glitches and problems that have yet been unexplained in a few publicized scenarios.


In the later model SGI's V12 failures are getting a lot more common and it's something I'm personally working on right now. That's only because there's a market for those cards right now. You don't see these failures as often with V10 even though they're basically the same card it tells you that the thermals are catching up with the design.


I don't make it a point to try to disassemble heat sinks off the chips. Most SGI's have some form of adhesive pad or adhesive compound holding the heat sink on the chip. It might be lightly holding it on where you can crack it off often times when you see people on YouTube try they end up pulling the entire processor out out of its socket if it socketed and still attached to the heat sink when they make the attempt.


SGI did not use much in the way of thermal paste. My feeling on that had to do with manufacturing tolerance and material longevity. You have to design a machine your surfaces a little more precisely to use some form of thermal paste to mate the two successfully. You'll find quite a number of these heat sinks are fairly rough and haven't been ground or lapped in anyway and so the tolerance is between the two surfaces are too gross and uneven to support thermal paste so they used thermal pads instead.


I'll also say that the thermal paste of the day was highly prone to breaking down over intense thermal cycling too. Some of these systems cycle so much heat that it's also possible that the common CPU thermal paste would just turn into a brittle chalky mess and stop doing its job after a few years with those kind of temperatures. Today we have a lot more options like ceramic paste and all that. I assumed it was a design and cost cutting measure and also meant that no one had to deal with improperly applied paste or any of it leaking or being tracked out and onto the board.

I've never personally heard of somebody attempting to use common thermal paste interface parts in an SGI.


Because it's not common to disassemble the heat sinks we don't have a lot of public knowledge on what size and composition all the fur pads are. Well obviously today you could probably use a standardize silicone thermal pad we would still need to know what thickness to use as most of the heat sinks are not spring-loaded to hold compression they're absolute distances.


there are some chips in the octane like the heart ASIC that I would not even touch with my hand as there have been reports of minor interaction with thermal expansion cracking solder joints to the chip and requiring a whole new midplane board.


SGI's were not designed to be stripped in the field. Those with a modular design like the octane were designed to have the entire module removed and then replaced by a field tech. Those machines that do not have modular boards were designed to just be part swapped in the field and the board taken back to SGI. I wouldn't call the boards well designed for the IT staff or even a curious owner to start removing components & heatsinks from. I would call that a bad idea.

[echo]

well, i ended up getting an entry level low specs octane2
no upgrades, no extras, but i liked it so i got it.
it probably hasn't been run in a long time, hopefully it won't have issues.
i can always upgrade it later if i need to.

it comes with an 18GB hdd, how much room does irix take up?
since hdd are pretty cheap i can add a larger second one right now, and just put apps on it.
or just set aside the small hdd and use just one big one for everything.
is there any reason to care about 15k vs 10k rpm? you mentioned heat, but its probably not that big a deal is it?
15k should let it seek faster, maybe perform better.

i could really use some help finding a good flat panel monitor for it. it's harder than i thought it would be.
i've been trying to find a modern flat panel display, with an IPS panel, that has sync on green.
maybe that doesn't exist, but i found some TN panel ones that might work.

what would happen if i used a modern high-res display, would it drop down to a lower supported mode, or just go black-screen out of range?
I mean with just a standard 13w3->vga cable, no extra scan conversion boxes or tricks involved.
if i found one that supports sync-on-green, which is a higher res screen, and has a vga input, would that work ok?
because i mean, these displays can do lower res non-native by putting black bars around it.

also, my modern pc's and laptops don't have a serial port.
so for the nullmodem cable, is it ok if i get a usb to db9-female nullmodem cable like this?
it has options for chipset: PL2303 or FTDI which one should i get?
https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Chipset-C...B0769CTG14

i'm going to just direct connect everything. i got a kvm but i won't experiment with it til i have the system all working.

[weblacky]

USB to serial normally works just fine assuming it's a a good chipset that uses all the correct pins. These days everything normally works just fine. The usual prolific chipsets are usually problem free. You still have to get a cable that's not Janky though. It's more getting the correct cabling if you're not making one yourself.

In terms of hard drives I would really recommend you not use a 15K drive. First of all you need to understand that the octane is an ultra wide (UW) bus not an ultra160 or ultra320. It's limited to 80 MB a second anyway for the entire bus. So there's no point in going faster than 80 MB a second.

A 15K drive is going to have noise and heat and even though the octane is one of the better systems that can do active cooling they were designed to be a desktop not a server rack. Personally I hate using 10 K drives if I can get away with it but a 10K drive that runs cooler will work. I provided a link to SGI depot of compatible drives that were recommended as a starting point. Please see those first.

And also as I mentioned Irix only needs about 3 GB to install so a 4 GB to 6 GB hard drive is a great drive to learn on because they don't take long to erase. As I mentioned in my private message when you screw up you have to erase the drive. Erasing a large hard drive takes an incredibly long time unless you have a separate Linux system and can use DD to increase the speed of wiping the entire drive. So it's worth having smaller Drive to learn on and then once you're done you can get a larger drive to your hearts content.

Also, as I replied previously, you're better off finding an older 4 x 3 aspect LCD monitor circa 2005 to 2009 designed between 17 to 19 inches made by a large company like Dell or NEC or Samsung. Then look up the specs online and most of those supported SOG.

Only a very late model octane graphics card has a chance of reaching 1080P, so there's no point in getting a monitor that can do it. As I said the default resolution for most SGIs is a 1280 x 1024.


19 inches is about the largest monitor I ever ran across that standard expectation was SOG back in the day. But a lot of stuff between 15 to 17 supported it in the early 2000s. So if you go to a computer recycler and find a $15 Dell ultra LCD you just look up on Google and most of them supported it.


Now if you configure the cable correctly, octane2 can output separate horizontal and vertical frequencies used in modern VGA ports but it doesn't remove the SOG signal. So the counterpart to your issue is you might display the image correctly but it would have a severe green tint to the picture. Because the cable can't filter out the SOG signal. There are third-party devices that can filter the SOG signal and that is something you could go with but that's another thing to plug-in and get warm and eventually overheat on you.


So while SOG monitors aren't common SOG tolerant monitors that don't use SOG are incredibly rare. There were monitors in the past that could understand that if both signals were present that they actually would filter out SOG by their understanding of the fact that they had a Special function to do that. You won't find that in anything today. And I don't know any way to check for SOG tolerance at all.


That's why it's easier to find a monitor that uses SOG that it is to find a monitor that's tolerant of SOG but uses the horizontal vertical sync pin signals that are offered by most modern SGI.

Video is one of those things you'll just need to compromise on. We're not asking you to get a CGA TV from 1979 here. We're just asking that the easiest way to start is to just get an older LCD monitor. And not all the old LCD monitors were ghosting nightmare pieces of junk. There were lots of good monitors in 2007 and 2008 that supported all this stuff and looked just fine they just happened to be 17" instead of 23".

Just look on eBay for local pick up only or other places find a square aspect LCD of the proper vintage look up its model online and check it as SOG compatibility and just go ahead and purchase it and pick it up. It's not worth the hassle of trying to convert to your monitor. You'll spend more money on converters and cables and weird stuff and trying to make it work than just getting the appropriate monitor.

[robespierre]

Erasing drives isn't necessary, unless you are concerned with data security. Simply doing a mkfs will destroy the existing filesystem and replace it with a new one.

[weblacky]

Erasing drives isn't necessary, unless you are concerned with data security. Simply doing a mkfs will destroy the existing filesystem and replace it with a new one.

It's been my personal experience unless you're also going clear the volume header you still could run into issues attempting to reload a drive that was previously set up with Irix.

if you're reinstalling the exact same version over and over again I would agree with you that things should probably be fine just learning how to do a mkfs at the inst before you open media.

But a lot of new people start getting antsy and they start switching distribution discs or overlays because they think they're corrupt or doing something wrong and then they start merging files into one another. Instead of going through the nuance of training people which of their file systems they can reformat and how to use the volume management tool to erase the miniroot files and all that so it's cleared it's a lot easier from a procedural standpoint to tell them to just erase/blank the entire drive properly to start from scratch and learn how to go through it correctly, by repetition.