[rescue] SGI... sweet!

[Robert Rose]

Hi all,

I'm back from my field trip to grab the O2 bargain of the century.  I can 
confirm the final specs are:

R5000SC 180MHz
64Mb RAM
2Gb disk
granite keyboard + mouse
AV option board but no moosecam :(
PCI fast ethernet card

and the final price was $US250.  Pictures of the toaster itself are at: 
www.rits.com.au/pictures/sgi/index.html

There are a few light scratches on the case and the metal protrusion that 
secures the system board was badly bent (I've since removed it), but 
otherwise it's in excellent condition and quite clean inside.  Now all I 
have to do is clean up my desk and rearrange monitors so I can actually 
crank it up.

Question time:

If I want to do useful video capture with this sucker, can I use NFS 
mounted RAID disk ?  If not, is it the network or the CPU (NFS client 
processes) that's going to be the bottleneck?

Does anyone BADLY want the PCI ethernet card ?  If so, speak up and we'll 
talk trades.  If not, I might see how it goes on ebay.

Do the SGI fast ethernet interfaces have any difficulties negotiating with 
any ethernet switches similar to the Sun hme and certain Cisco switches?

cheers,

Rob.