The collected works of Trippynet - Page 3

ivelegacy wrote: @ Trippynet
which is your Applications target ? i mean what App do you run on your Octane2/2xR14K ?

I'm afraid I don't have an Octane2, just an Indigo2 and a Fuel. I use mine for music (XMMS), retro gaming, bits of scripting in Perl, running stuff like Dillo and Firefox, and other general experimenting. Not really what SGIs were originally intended for I know

I know it's speaking the obvious, but have you tried re-seating all the RAM? If this doesn't work, do you know if it's a faulty DIMM or a fault with the socket?

Hmm, JACK is one I've not really looked at before to be honest. Must admit, I'm not sure what I'd use it for as I usually want the output of XMMS to run to my speakers. Timidity++ seems like something I'd fine more useful as I do have a pile of older MIDI files. Don't worry at all if you're too busy to dig this out for now as I'm not in desperate need of it or anything!

Of course, if someone else would fine a use for JACK, I'll let them say. However given the bits you have on with MPlayer and everything, I'd say don't go to too much trouble with this one at the moment. If you've any other bits though that may be made available (even if I have to compile them), please do let me know.

And as always, thank you!!

Just to note that I've tried it here and the newer build also did not fix the issue, but selecting a theme did fix it. It also gave me chance to turn the messages off to stop the console window going bananas every time I open a page with it.

Thanks again for your work with this!

Nice system! I'm a big fan of the R10K Indigo2s. My system also feels a lot more responsive than my old O2, but then my O2 was just an R5000 one. The network adapter is a big plus as the built-in 10Mb NIC really is too slow if you're doing any amount of data transfers over the network (as I often do).

Looking forward to the pictures!

Yeah, you won't get a full 100Mb out of them and they do load the CPU quite a bit when transferring lots of stuff, but that's the limitations of the EISA bus for you. I get about 4-5MB/s with mine which isn't exactly incredible, but it is still significantly faster than 10Mb networking.

It's possible to get full 100Mb networking with the Indigo2, but then you need the GIO expansion card and these are a lot more expensive (and rare).

Edit: Glad to see that "Intel Inside" sticker quickly disappeared

I think it's just a case of being a bit more forceful with airflow. You're right that air will choose the path of least resistance, so your fan will likely be pulling a reasonable amount of air *in* from the other hole. Having two out-blowing fans might be better. Oh, and make sure the input vent at the bottom is big enough too.

Do you know if your building vent is blowing air out or in? If it's in, that's going to cause all manner of problems and should probably be sealed up (gaffer tape would do).

duck wrote: Yeah, the bottom vent is about the same area as the two new holes.

Might be worth trying to make it bigger. If it's that similar in size, the fans will be having to work quite hard to pull extra air in, and consequently the output from them won't be as great as it could be. Although saying that, I'd add a second fan first and see what that does.

If you want to keep just one fan, ironically blocking up the second hole temporarily might actually improve things as the fan will then be force to pull air in from the other vents.

I'm going to assume that as he's from Austria, he swaps the comma with the decimal point. So that would be 13,861 kWh of gas and 1,876 kWh of electricity to us English speaking types

Yep, I wind my German missus up about this on a regular basis

Yep. Decent CRTs are still worth something even today. I used to be in charge of IT for a Psychology department at a university until 2 1/2 years ago and they still to this day use CRTs for most of their research simply because you get millisecond-precise timing from them, plus most decent ones support refresh rates of 100-120Hz. As so many have been scrapped and they've become so rare, a decent 20"+ monitor with good refresh rates therefore has quite a value these days.

TFTs are getting there, but 1ms ones with high refresh rates are still rare and expensive, plus all of them are horrible 16:9 jobbies at the moment.

I've been having problems like this with my Indigo2 recently. Just to check, turn it off completely at the wall and unplug it, then after 20 seconds plug it in and try again. My own system will not power on after a soft shutdown unless I unplug it first - which is annoying. After an unplug/re-plug, it powers up OK.

Doesn't sound good! One other thing you can try is to open it up and remove most un-essential bits, such as add-in cards, hard drives, CD drive, that sort of thing. I have had a 50->80 pin adaptor place a short across the PSU in my own Indigo2 and that obviously prevented it from firing up at all. I removed the hard drive, hit the PSU switch and it then burst into life.

If it's still dead with most none-essentials removed, it sounds like the PSU. It's possible to re-cap an Indigo2 PSU - something I intend trying with mine at some point, but it's not completely straightforward unless you know what you're doing with high-voltage electronics. Jan-jaap has done it before with varying degrees of success. Alternatively, it's probably replacement PSU time.

An update: System now has 384MB of RAM. For some reason I forgot all this time that I have two Indys in the cupboard, both of which have 128MB of RAM in them (one of which has a dead PSU anyway), and my Indigo 2 had 8 free RAM slots in it still. So a quick swaparoo later and the Indigo 2 now has a bit more RAM to play with!

Other upgrades it's received since I originally posted the hinv are a 300GB secondary HDD, and a 32X CD drive. Still not found a nice cheap HighIMPACT or MaxIMPACT card yet though...

ivelegacy wrote: i am afraid i have not understood which netlan you are talking about, never seen other options except the Phobos

Best bet is the page about it on Ian Mapleson's site - http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/fastether.html

In a nutshell, the Phobos GIO64 cards deliver much closer to 100Mb ethernet, but are pricey. Or the EISA cards are a lot cheaper, but restricted due to the bus. The card in my machine is one of the 3Com EISA ones with the hacked Phobos driver to make it work. It's physically pretty much identical to the official Phobos EISA cards, but the driver is tweaked to stop it rejecting my card due to it not being the Phobos version (I didn't do the driver hack...)

It's not a speed freak, but it's definitely a chunk faster than 10Mb.

Best of luck with it! The O2s aren't the fastest things around, but they are very small, neat and cute. It's also fairly straight-forward to replace the fan in the PSU to make them almost silent in operation as well.

Hard drive wise, any 1" high 80pin SCA drive will do. I'm fortunate in that I've acquired quite a pile of them from old decommissioned servers at work. Hence for a while, my O2 (back when it was in use) had two 300GB 10k hard drives in it. Of course, next step after that is to hope you've got a set of IRIX CDs kicking around

As a Newcastle fan myself, sorry we added to your plight yesterday.

Watching your team suffering as a result of the owner is not a nice feeling (and I can relate there). However, a section of Villa fans might want to cast their minds back a few years to the season Newcastle got relegated and remember how they reacted at the time (not at all nicely as it happens). For those particular fans, sympathy is in rather short supply from me. For the rest of you, best of luck and hope you stay up!

All my SGI machines run IRIX. I've spent a fair bit of time quietening them down. On the O2, I replaced the PSU fan with a Nocturna one (a common mod) and it's now VERY quiet. My Fuel has also been almost completely re-fanned and is very quiet too. The fans of my Indigo2 have all been replaced, but I can't dial the PSU fan down too much as the thing just kicks out too much heat for me to risk it. Still a lot quiter than originally though!

I use my SGIs for all manner of pratting around in IRIX, scripting in Perl, playing music through XMMS, I've recently been using my Indigo2 to rip a bunch of vinyls. Other bits involve a few games such as ScummVM games, Quake 3 on my Fuel and such-forth. Ultimately, they're just good fun. I enjoy trying to compile old plugins for XMMS, or writing a script to selectively synchronise certain files/folders between my two main systems via a shared staging folder on my PC and such forth. It's just good old-fashioned fun!

uunix wrote: these things come round and bite you in the ass no matter..

They do indeed. And one thing that rubs salt into the wound when your team has just been relegated is a bunch of fans from another team who don't really have any specific rivalry with your team mocking you about it and reveling in your misfortune. Still, I'll rise above that and wish you all the best. Villa do have some good players - if Sherwood can get them to start playing well together...

I'd say "Yes". Always better to get hold of something like this, then maybe sell it to someone who may want to use it than let it be scrapped. I've got two old Indys in the cupboard which haven't been powered up in years. However, I'd never scrap them. If ever I decided I really didn't want to keep them, I'd either sell them or give them away first.

chicaneuk wrote:

jan-jaap wrote: Hamei is right. An Indigo2 always has that 'snappy' responsiveness that even the fastest O2 lacks. The R10K/R12K are rather restricted by the O2 architecture.

Thank-you! I recently acquired an R10K Indigo2 and immediately thought how much quicker it felt than my O2 which had a faster CPU (R12K 300MHz). Just a general all round level of snappiness and responsiveness - the O2 felt rather more old and out of shape in comparison. But when I posted my thoughts in the hinv thread I created, I was somewhat shot down.

I'm glad it wasn't just in my imagination!

I noticed the same when going from my O2 to my Indigo2. Even though I dropped 5MHz and went to the slower FastSCSI2 bus for the disks, it feels a lot more brisk and snappy than my O2 ever did.

Saying that, I do appreciate that the O2 is smaller, lighter, quieter and less power-hungry than the Indigo2! A lot depends on what you want it for and what your expectations are.

It's close, but I think the Windows ME script also had the restore_viruses() subroutine which is missing from the Win98 script.

Yeah, twas a bit of a sod to lose to an 89th minute goal like that, but then that's Man Utd for you...

Bear in mind it's an apples-for-oranges comparison. Tasks that can utilise both CPUs efficiently will run faster on the Octane. Single threaded tasks can run faster on a Fuel as it supports up to 900MHz CPUs.

Then just to complicate matters further, Fuel has faster disk I/O than Octane, so tasks involving a lot of data transfer may benefit from the U160 SCSI bus on the Fuel - if you have a fast enough hard drive of course. Hence, getting the faster machine depends a lot on the price. Plus as you've seen, a dual 600MHz Octane can still fetch quite a price. Although saying that, the 800MHz and particularly 900MHz Fuels also hold their value well too.

mapesdhs wrote: Btw, removing 760 screws from HP server sleds is REALLY BORING.

*cough* Sorry, felt the need to vent there a tad... :}

I can emphasise. I removed nearly 50 HDDs from 3 AS400s recently at work and each of those was secured in place with EIGHT torq screws. Took ages to get them all out. Found a few nice 36GB 15K quiet drives in amongst that lot, but most of them were unfortunately poor/noisy drives.

No use for the HP sleds here I'm afraid, I've chucked a whole load recently from work - after salvaging any nice drives from them before they went to the scrapper of course!

I can also confirm that a lot of Dell TFTs support Sync On Green correctly, as does my big 27" Viewsonic screen. Currently I use a Dell 2007FP 20" TFT screen that I acquired as a spare from work for my SGIs. Works a treat, even with a 13W3 to VGA adaptor.

I'd recommend reading Ian's page on this. He points out exactly which 4 caps need replacing and the correct types to replace them with. If you can get one of your friends to do it and re-pay them in beer tokens, that should be enough! For anyone competent with soldering and electronics, it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to do the work.

http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2psu.html

ClassicHasClass wrote: GREEN FOETZ
FEAR!!!!!

And on 5555 posts as well...

Depends how quickly you want to sell it!

You could imagine 250 Euros for the base system with CPU and Solid Impact graphics, maybe another 200 Euros for the RAM and 200 Euros for the NICs (although you might be better off pulling one of them out and selling separately as there's probably not many people interested in a system with TWO 100MB NICs), maybe another 50 Euros for the ZIP and CD drive and you're looking at 700 Euros.

It's a difficult one overall, as if you push the price too high, people will start to want HighIMPACT or above for those sort of prices and may not be willing to part with that kind of money for a system with only SolidIMPACT (even if the rest of it is nice).

If it struggles to sell for that sort of price, you might get more money by selling half the RAM separately, along with one of the NICs, then try to get 500 Euros for the system after this (seeing as it'll still be a fully usable system).

For what it's worth, I paid just over £300 for a SolidIMPACT system with 36GB HDD, 256MB RAM, 100MB EISA NIC, foot stands and decent-quality case from Ian last year. The other upgrades to the one in my sig have taken place after this.

ivelegacy is from Italy and was looking for an O2+ (or similarly maxed-out O2) recently. Might be worth sending him a PM to see if he's still looking?

ivelegacy wrote: Phobos G160 is … too slow, i can achieve only 10Mbyte/sec

That's about right for any 100Mb NIC - it's not a limitation of the Phobos card specifically. 100Mbit / 8 = 12.5MB/s absolute theoretical maximum. And pretty much all cards top out a bit below this due to overheads etc. To get much more than that, you'd need a gigabit card and no such thing exists for the Indigo2. Only faster option I'm aware of is fibre-channel.

ivelegacy wrote: I was asked 250 euro + shipping + VAT

Sounds reasonable. The 700 Euros was the absolute rose-tinted spectacle price and to be fair, you probably wouldn't get many takers at that. It should sell for 250 Euros without any problem. Heck, it'd sell for 250 probably with half the RAM and one NIC, so I would still pull those out and sell separately myself. They're unlikely to add to the value of the system that much if you leave them in.

Jan Jaap wrote: I would say half of that is so you can feel assured that someone will answer the mail if you run into a problem. Not that there's anything wrong with that, on the contrary. Ian can simply demand a higher price than you or I can.

It was also because of the fact that the system was fully cleaned out inside, Ian T-cutted the case to smooth off the scratches (and did a really good job IMO), set the extra NIC up, plus there's a mountain of software on it as well, along with a cloned spare HDD of the system image, CDs of extra software, etc. There was the advantage of being able to spec up exactly what I wanted, rather than having to rely on what was maybe available on eBay. Actually, speaking of which, Indigo2 systems seem to be very rare on eBay in the UK as of late. I've not had a single one show up at all in the last year which was UK based.

I know you can get Indigo2s a fair bit cheaper if you really shop around and look for a bargain, but I don't begrudge for one minute paying a bit more for one from Ian

Excellent. Please let us know how it goes!

Awesome news! Anything that helps get useful tools like MPlayer developed in a more MIPS/IRIX-friendly way has got to be a good thing

Not something I remember myself, but try having a look on Wayback machine. They've got cached versions of SGI's site going back to the 1990s, so maybe you can find the section again and the pictures that they had.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.sgi.com

The O2 is thankfully one of the easiest SGI systems to silence (probably beaten only by the Indy with the Sony PSU, and even then the HDDs are a bit more of a faf to sort as you need adapters for the newer SCA drives). I replaced the PSU fan in my old O2 with a quiet Noctua fan and popped a really quiet 300GB hard drive in it (snaffled for free out of a dead server at work) and it was almost silent by the time I'd finished. Overall it's a nice little machine and a great starter system for someone coming into the SGI fold!

foetz wrote: so you're running a gtk2 firefox on an indigo
now that's brave

It does run slow, I must admit. I usually try and stick with Dillo for web browsing on my Indigo2, but sometimes Dillo's rendering engine just won't cut it on certain pages. The latest FF3 build is at least much more on a par with the performance of SeaMonkey. Slow on an old R10000, but sometimes slow is better than nothing

diegel wrote: When I remember the 90th with Internet backbone capacities of 2 mbit or less and dialin modems with 33,6kbit/s, compared with that even a ff3 running on an old R10000 is fast. With today's technology everything is much faster of course, but is it also better? Some days ago I used the web without noscript and adblocker with a current system and I was shocked about poor performance and the amount of advertising, I love entering a time capsule by using my old computers.

Yep, I remember those days as well. Netscape on an Indigo2 at work or web browsing under Windows 98 at home were quite acceptable back then. I didn't find the speeds too bad as most the pages were very basic of course. And although they took a good few seconds to load, the OS and browser would stay nice and responsive as the most taxing thing you had to worry about was the odd animated GIF.

I suppose the main difference I noticed more recently was using my O2 back in the early 2000s to browse the web. Although a bit slow, Firebird (from SGI freeware) could render pages fine, and the performance was overall acceptable. Then a couple of years ago when I dug my O2 out of storage and fired it up, Firebird couldn't even render a basic phpBB forum and it ground to a halt when trying. And yet, I don't seem to recall modern versions of phpBB containing tons of additional useful functionality, it's all just bloat.

Thanks! I don't feel as celebratory as I thought strangely, even though we did eventually do it ourselves (rather than relying on others failing). More relief than anything. We may have stayed up, but we've still had a dreadful season overall. Still, easier to rebuild with another PL season to look forward to than being back in the championship I guess.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Your opinions aren't welcomed in my want to buy threads - that's not polite.

To be blunt, instead of bitching you could have just answered the question, or said nothing at all. This is a discussion forum after all. People should be welcome to discuss things. Whether you answer them of course is up to you.

However, I'm probably not the only one tired of seeing snappy responses when someone simply asks you a question. Who knows, maybe you have a really good reason for wanting such a system and others can see your response and think "hey, what a good idea!". Or maybe you just want one because they look neat. Either way, please cut out the moaning.

Very nice system!