[rescue] some stuff I'm trying to find

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Joshua Boyd writes ...
> On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 09:35:04PM -0800, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> > Saith Phil Stracchino ...
> >  
> > > I keep being tempted by the idea of picking up an SGI box 
> > > sometime.
> > 
> > You should.  They are fun.  The Indigo2 R10K is a very 
> > decent machine, even
> > by modern standards.  Yeah, the SCSI stuff is all 50-pin 
> > and a little slow,
> > and the networking speed (even with the 3com 100base card) 
> > isn't going to
> > melt your Cat5, but it's not too bad at all.
> 
> If I'm not mistaken there is another FastE choice for the I2 that is
> much faster than the 3com EISA card.  I can't seem to jog the 
> name from my head though.

That'd be a Phobos G160 card.  It goes on the GIO64 bus, and is reputed to
be quite fast.  They seem to be relatively rare, and somewhat expensive.
I've never actually seen one. 

The Phobos E100 card is a version of the 3com 3c597, and fits on the EISA
bus.  You can hack the Phobos driver to work wih a normal 3c597.  It's
noticeable faster than the built-in 10baseT interface, but not a full
100Mbps.  More like 50, I think.

> There are ways to get faster networking and disks into the I2.  For
> instance, there are UW SCSI cards, FC-AL cards, FDDI cards, and HiPPi
> cards.  All but the FDDI cards tend to be hard to find though.

If you have Max Impact graphics, however, you only have one open slot for
any sort of add-in.

Of course, if you mentioned this problem to your SGI rep, he'd tell you he
had a fix.  He'd offer to trade you up to an ONYX.

-Shel