Someone gave me SGI stuff

[techknight]

Ill be honest. i know NOTHING about SGI, IRIX, anything. only seen SGI stuff in movies, like jurassic park.

Someone just gave me an octane system, and an indy R5000 system. its just the systems.

I ripped apart the octane, it has a 2 processor CPU stack, R10000 CPUs. looks like solid gold/ceramic.

The machine powers on, drives spin, thats it. i have no monitor or nothing to test it. dont even know where to begin to plug an LCD or something in it. (i dont keep CRT stuff, all gone, too heavy).

I dont hear any activity from the HDD, like clicking from a booting system. it just powers on spins up thats it. so its probably stuck on something.

Same for the R5000. I fired up the R5000, it chimed. something the octane didnt do. HDD spun up, 2GB SCSI drive. same deal. i didnt hear any clicking from the sounds of it booting, maybe dead RTC, stuck at the BIOS, no idea.

They came from P&G, they were given to me to wipe the drive and dispose of how i wished. Well im gonna keep them if i can use it for something.

I also have 2 rackmount SGI server type systems, i forget what they are. Also got 2 SGI tape backup systems that are catalog auto-load. put like 5 or 10 tapes in it and it auto loads each one. big fat wide SCSI plug. All white unit, kinda looks like an extended length toaster oven with a dot matrix LCD display. lol.

I was also given a SGI fibre channel clariion rack which i scrapped out and disposed of. i dont have 220 circuits to run it. Had the matching SGI 2400 that went with it. I stripped it down and scrapped it as well. Kept hte rack for modern stuff.

But i actually decided to keep these, as they are MUCH smaller and run on 110.


any ideas? thanks.

[SAQ]

Slow down with the screwdriver! SGIs have delicate parts that can be easily damaged if you rush in too fast.

To start off you'll need either a serial null-modem cable or a monitor/keyboard. Once you get it plugged in you can bring up a console. Workstation's firmware is much more useful than a PC BIOS, and you can poke around and see what's on the machine for hardware. When the "stop for maintenance" screen comes up, press "esc" and then select the command monitor (option 5). Typing "hinv" will give you a list of all installed hardware. If you don't get to that point there might be a hardware problem.

For wiping the disks you can either boot into the IRIX miniroot and cat "/dev/zero" over the disk a couple of times or plug it into a PC/Mac with a SCSI HBA and use your favorite disk wiping program.

To start with you can post the model number from the back of the Octane. That will help narrow down what the original CPU config was.

[techknight]

Slow down with the screwdriver! SGIs have delicate parts that can be easily damaged if you rush in too fast.

To start off you'll need either a serial null-modem cable or a monitor/keyboard. Once you get it plugged in you can bring up a console. Workstation's firmware is much more useful than a PC BIOS, and you can poke around and see what's on the machine for hardware. When the "stop for maintenance" screen comes up, press "esc" and then select the command monitor (option 5). Typing "hinv" will give you a list of all installed hardware. If you don't get to that point there might be a hardware problem.

For wiping the disks you can either boot into the IRIX miniroot and cat "/dev/zero" over the disk a couple of times or plug it into a PC/Mac with a SCSI HBA and use your favorite disk wiping program.

To start with you can post the model number from the back of the Octane. That will help narrow down what the original CPU config was.

Im sorry to sound like an idiot, but most of this is over my head. I am a mac/windows user, who writes software in Basic, or Basic variants such as realbasic, basic4android, etc... with almost no experience with linux, other than FreeNAS which pissed me off to no end with its kmem_alloc crashes. hehe.

when you start talking about miniroot, tree roots, or any other kind of roots im lost, besides rootbeer. that stuff is good. Now for the fine points: I know what a null modem cable is, its the TX/RX reversed on both ends. When you say bring up console, what do you mean? whats a hinv? of course i dunno what a miniroot is. or a dev/zero.

I am more of a hardware guy rather than software guy. As far as the screwdriver, too late. lol. i already had the CPU stack apart and pulled the CPUs out to see what they were. thats how i found out they were R10000. I did manage to put it all back together, whether it works or not, no idea.

[josehill]

when you start talking about miniroot, tree roots, or any other kind of roots im lost, besides rootbeer. that stuff is good. Now for the fine points: I know what a null modem cable is, its the TX/RX reversed on both ends. When you say bring up console, what do you mean? whats a hinv? of course i dunno what a miniroot is. or a dev/zero.

A "console" is a place where certain types of computers will send various system messages that are usually of more interest to system administrators than to end users. In the old days, the console was often a dedicated display terminal with a keyboard for admins to type in system commands, but it can also be a window in a terminal emulator.

When SAQ mentioned "bringing up a console," he meant connecting your SGI machines either to an appropriate keyboard and monitor or to another computer via a null modem cable and a terminal emulation program. When you do that, it is possible to see what your computer is doing as it boots, including viewing error messages. SGI systems also have fairly sophisticated boot PROMs (analogous to a PC BIOS) which allow you to run various programs and diagnostics, even if the hard drives are blank. One of the commands that can be run from the PROM is "hinv", which will display a "hardware inventory" of your machine.

Miniroot is a basic, temporary IRIX environment that includes many more features than are in the boot PROM, and it is often used for tasks like erasing disks or installing software. Miniroot environments are included on IRIX software installation cds.

I recommend taking a look at some of the hardware manuals at techpubs.sgi.com:

Indy -
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... dy_OwnerGd

Octane -
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ane_HWCntl
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... /Octane_OG

[hamei]

A "console" is a place where certain types of computers will send various system messages that are usually of more interest to system administrators than to end users. In the old days, the console was often a dedicated display terminal with a keyboard for admins to type in system commands, but it can also be a window in a terminal emulator.

jose, take it easy on the guy Think of it as a remote DOS prompt .... you connect a cable from a serial port on your Windows computer to the console port on the SGI. Then you use a program like Hyperterminal on the peecee to see what's happening on the SGI computer.

The one thing you might consider is that these new treasures were workstations. Companies normally don't buy workstations to run Office 2000. They may very well have software that you'd like to keep. So I would check the drives before I got too carried away with the Handi-Wipes.

[josehill]

jose, take it easy on the guy Think of it as a remote DOS prompt .... you connect a cable from a serial port on your Windows computer to the console port on the SGI. Then you use a program like Hyperterminal on the peecee to see what's happening on the SGI computer.

Thanks. Your response was better than mine.

[hamei]

Your response was better than mine.

I'm dumber, so I have more experience at keeping it simple

[guardian452]

They came from P&G

are you in Cincinnati?

[techknight]

yes I am, well close by to cinci. I would love to scrounge around on the HDD, but its been deemed classified and i dont want a lawsuit. i HAVE to wipe them.

the Octane is a CMNB015ANF175. it has the PCI box as well. The octain has what appears to be 2 video cards? one of them has a 3D glasses plug.

[techknight]

the rack peices, there are 3 and it says CMN026. I think one of the peices is part of it, as they are joined together with a big fat cable. SCSI or router cable?

[jan-jaap]

the rack peices, there are 3 and it says CMN026.

Origin 350, or (if it has DVI outputs), an Onyx350 or Onyx4. http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... igin350_UG

I think one of the peices is part of it, as they are joined together with a big fat cable. SCSI or router cable

That's a NUMAlink.

Where your Octane (CMNB015ANF175) has one or two 175MHz R10000 CPUs, the Origin 350 has 2 or 4 CPUs / module, and they usually are 700MHz - 1GHz R16000s. It is *much* faster, but it's a server, not a workstation.

[recondas]

the rack peices, there are 3 and it says CMN026. I think one of the peices is part of it, as they are joined together with a big fat cable. SCSI or router cable?

As jan-jaap mentioned, CMN026 could be one of the Origin 350 variants or even possibly an early Altix 350. In either case the model info should be printed on the plastic fascia panel, but you could simplify the guessing game with a few photos of the front and rear panels of anything you aren't certain of. As long as they aren't multi-megabyte-right-off-the-camera in size you can attach the photos to your post.

[guardian452]

Well, if you need help figuring anything out I am also "close by" but I will be moving downtown soon (december). I have school and work during the day and soccer during the evening and weekends but we can of course meet at some point if you wish and I can help you get going with them. If you ever need any octane parts I can probably help out, I have my green machine still in the basement. Most parts have been upgraded so I can almost build another machine with my spares. (just not set up right now so I don't have him in my siggy)

The rules are simple. Don't expose them to light, or else they will die. Don't get them wet, or else you will be up to your ears in colourful plastic. Don't feed them after midnight, or else they will turn into peecees.

[techknight]

The rack servers have DVI on the back. I dont see anything on the face other than "sgi" and they have a character LCD?

[recondas]

The rack servers have DVI on the back. I dont see anything on the face other than "sgi" and they have a character LCD?

What color are the front panels, and are the DVI ports in one of the PCI slots (on the right rear side of the system), or are they located closer to the rear center top?

That info will help narrow down the list of possibles, but a couple of photos would remove the guesswork.