10 Apr
2012
10 Apr
'12
9:57 a.m.
On Tuesday 10 April 2012, Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
Agreed...
Just a few pointers.
Check out http://forums.nekochan.net. The site is down at the moment but
usualy quite alive and has more than a few members with Onyx2 racks
(myself included).
Nekochan is very good.
I have brought up SGIs including Elans, Maximum Impacts, Octanes, etc. up to Onyx3s. I
have found that the following site(s) by Ian Mapleson are great sources of SGI info:
England:
http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html
U.S. Mirror
http://vintagecomputers.info/sgi.html
If you get stuck, you can email Ian and as you can imagine, he knows SGI. He also has
spare parts (if you don't mind paying shipping costs from the UK).
Check out sgi documentation (I'm sure you have
seen it):
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/dynaweb_docs/hdwr/SGI_Admin/books/Onyx2_Rac…
Agreed, techpubs.sgi.com is still a great source. I'd download all you can from there,
as the "new" SGI doesn't do MIPS and has been slowly deleting MIPS related
information from there websites and Supportfolio.
Speaking of which, you might want to sign up with Supportfolio:
https://support.sgi.com/
IIRC, you can still sign up free - and get certain IRIX patches and other software which
is downloadable free.
When it comes to spares.. well, the PSU seems to go
and I'd like to keep
my spares for when I bring my own rack up. I could probably separate
with a few node boards (uncertain what I actually have, will have to
check).
Indeed, most of us who collect SGIs have a good number of spares we've collected over
time - as they have been getting more and more difficult to find. Scrappers love MIPS
based SGIs because their backplanes and boards have a high level of gold content. Sigh...
The MMSC fails
in the display if I'm not misstaken, perhaps a
replacement LCD could be found?
But you should be able to fire up the
whole system with just one.
And finally, I love your youtube channel! keep the videos comming :)
Cheers,
Lyle
On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 08:47:33AM -0500, JP Hindin
wrote:
--
Lyle Bickley, AF6WS
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
Greetings;
Long-story-short, a couple of years ago I picked up six Onyx2 racks and
have been moving them around with me without ever actually firing them up.
I've finally got myself sorted and have been slowly working through
bringing things up and having some successes, but every step closer has me
finding a new problem.
My set-up right now has one graphics head and five compute nodes cabled
together in a daisy-chain (not enough CrayLinks for anything else). It
appears all but one of the MMSCs are shot, so I'm doing manual start-ups
using the keys.
My current confusion is how to nominate which system becomes the Global
Master. For some odd reason whenever I bring up three racks the machine
I've "picked" as the master (keyboard/mouse/gfx head) comes up just fine
and boots into IRIX, but whenever I add two more nodes things get a bit
more fuzzy and the Global Master appears to migrate around.
I had initially believed that the last rack in the power-up sequence would
always become the Global Master, since it goes and finds all the rest, but
this apparently is not the case... or perhaps there are corollaries I'm
unaware of.
The more times I turn this thing on and off the more hardware is failing
on me, not unexpectedly. I've lost a PSU, a node board and now one of the
racks has started making a worryingly hot-electrical smell. I'd really
like to get it all working together just once before I get old and grey.
Cheers;
- JP