[rescue] SGI Crimsons and Challenge L found a new home

[Francois Dion]

Hundreds of lbs of SGI hardware are now in my house. I forgot the 
camera, so I dont have any pictures of the rescue operation. I'll take 
some of the machines once I set them up.

Drove up (with the whole family) to VA friday night, picked the machines 
saturday morning (good thing it stopped raining at that moment), my wife 
did a bit of shopping in Arlington and we drove back to NC.  The 
Challenge L (with 7 drives) was the heaviest. It was an interesting 
challenge (obviously that's how they came up with the name :P ) to get 
it from point A to point B. One of the Crimson is actually hiding in a 
Power deskside unit (4D Iris) and the other is in its proper red 
deskside. By far the prettiest machine. And of course they all have the 
pre-assimilation SGI cube logo, not the text abheration.

I will need a few parts to get the Crimsons up and running. In 
particular, I need 50 pin SCSI drives. What is the largest drive I can 
use? Anybody has a few drives, I'll need 8. I know they are on ebay all 
the time, but i'd trust more somebody from the list to get some that 
actually work. I'd love to get my hands on CDROM drives for these also, 
but I understand that they are extremely rare.

Network is 10mbit w/ aui adapter. I do have the adapter, but 10mbit is 
not the fastest, particularly to do an install from the Challenge. Were 
there any 100mbit available for them? How about a reality engine, 
anybody has one?

Lastly, I need Irix 6.2. I have 6.5 but the Crimsons wont run anything 
newer than 6.2.

The Challenge L is mostly in need of some cosmetic pieces: one of the 
bottom side trim and the back panel were missing. I'd also would love to 
add another 4 cpu board to make it complete but at any rate it's ready 
to be put back in service.

Francois