[rescue] Have I erred? (SGI division)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:

> I decided to get with the Sun Rescue program and rescue an SGI today ...

Yay!  SGIs need just as much love as Suns do.

> I got a teal-cased Indigo2 with 200 MHz R4400,

Nice.

> 80 MB RAM and Extreme

Nice.  You'll like Extreme gfx.  It's the highest-quality desktop board
set available before they released IMPACT gfx.

> graphics and a GDM20D11 monitor.  The computer has no drives or drive
> sleds, but the seller is going to give me one HD sled.

If he has more.  Take them.  They're reaching the point of unobtanium.  I
have one that I'm not using, but I will -never- get rid of it, so long as
I own an Indigo2.

> As you might expect, I have a few questions....
>
> Will a Sun 13w3 video cable work?

Yes.  If the pins aren't straight-through (or aren't all present), it
won't detect your 20" tube and might disable some of the higher-resolution
video modes, but SGIs only need the three coax connectors to put a picture
on the screen.

> Will this monitor work on a Sun LX?

No.  It's sync-on-green only.  Suns use composite sync.

> On a typical PC?

No, it's fixed-frequency sync-on-green.  Most PCs use separate sync
signals.  Some Matrox boards will work with it, but I couldn't tell you
which.  It'll work handsomely on that SGI, though. :)

> Will this box boot from my Sun-bootable Plexstor 32X, 68-pin SCSI CD-ROM
> drive?

Yes.

> Does it want 50-pin or 68-pin SCSI internal drives?

50-pine, but finding the trays might prove difficult.

> If the seller doesn't provide a sled, will the Indigo2 work with just an
> external SCSI HD, none internal?

Yes.  You'll need to frob the prom configuration so that it boots from
something other than disc 1 on SCSI chain 0, though.  It's no big deal,
though.

An important bit of SCSI knowlege on SGIs:  NEVER USE ID 0.  SGI reserves
ID 0 for the controller, rather than 7.  So, 7 is available, but 0 is not.
It makes a lot more sense, when you think about it, but it is different
from everyone else's implementation.  This holds true on both the internal
and external chains with every SGI SCSI controller I've met.

> He's offered me a choice between IRIX 6.2 and 6.5 ... which should I
> choose?

6.5, if you plan on ever exposing it to the public Internet.  6.2 will run
much faster, but has security holes that SGI will never patch.  Also, it's
getting harder and harder to find software that will run on 6.2.

IRIX 6.5 is a memory hog, but RAM is reasonably cheap for an Indigo2:
72-pin, 60ns, FPM, true parity, up to 32MB per stick on an IP22, which is
what you have.  IP28 (R10k) can take 64MB sticks.  Install memory in banks
of four.  The installation order is marked on the motherboard.

> If it's teal, why do they call it Indigo?

Look!  Over there!  Something distracting!

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
  "gnu: we aim to fuck up everything with the potential to not suck"
                                                   --alex j avriette