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SGI IMPACT Indigo2 Back Up and Running

glitch

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2010
Messages
5,051
Location
Central VA
Wow, imgur says *five* *years* ago I pulled out Amy's Indigo2 IMPACT machine and started cleaning it up:



This machine came from Virginia Tech surplus, pretty sure Amy picked it up while we were still in college. Someone helpfully wrote a bunch of information down and stuck it inside the front door:



Including the hostname and the date it was shut down (which makes sense for when we were still at VT):



Well, last weekend I finally decided to actually set it up properly. I'd already done the NVRAM, of course :p I believe I'd had NetBSD 7.x booting on it, which let me verify everything was still working. Interestingly, NetBSD 9.2 no longer seems to boot from the installation CD: it loads the kernel and stops when it identifies int0. No messages, just hangs. Something to investigate later!

The main impetus to actually getting IRIX 6.5 installed was a) getting a hard disk in it and b) remembering to burn a set of discs. I have a super nice Seagate Barracuda with 50-pin low density connector, 36 GB, 0.2 hour on the internal counter. Very quiet, doesn't run hot. Since the Indigo2 should be fast enough that a SCSI2SD would be the bottleneck, that's where the Barracuda is now installed. I couldn't get a SCA drive and adapter in there, at least not with what I thought was a suitable fit, and I was worried about heat anyway.

After feeding discs and waiting a while, I have IRIX 6.5 up and running:



I had images for IRIX 6.5 from 1998 so that's what I've burned, but I'm thinking I will do a clean install with the 6.5.22 overlays, since I know everything is working now.

First thing to update will obviously be the RAM: it has 64MB installed, and if I understand the tables correctly, I should be able to put 384MB in there, with the R4400.
 
Welcome to IRIXland. ;)

As you may of noticed, yes there's a ton of CD's to handle. The base OS, the latest overlay discs you can find (I forget if the R10K I2 or the Octane was the first that could be upgraded all the way to .30), the developer discs and the extras like NFS and Freeware, in which there's multiple versions of the freeware discs. I have not needed to do an install in nearly a decade but it was 15 discs, many being handled more than once for conflict resolution and final installation which ate up the majority of the day to complete and then apply initial configurations like networking and minor system tweaks. I think the dweebs over at IRIXnet now have a network solution for doing it all now. :p

Apparently the old Nekoware freeware is now obsolete and the newer stuff is...well I'm not entirely sure. It seems that most software is now compiled against GCC as opposed to SGI's MIPSpro compilers, which is weirdly backwards to me because I remember years ago that GCC compiled software on Irix was a bloated slug. Now that things aren't packaged nicely in TARDIST files that swmgr can process I have no idea how the heck this works to install new software.

Edited: Oh, R4400. Sorry I'm too used to seeing the IMPACT systems as R10000 so yeah you are stuck with 6.5.22m.
 
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Nice pictures.

Can you load a Netscape Navigator 4.7 and try to load this forum? I guess it will not work...
 
Definitely doesn't load the forums...I tried it at lunctime just for laughs :)

Bought 4x 32MB FPM parity SIMMs to test, figured I'd make sure they work before buying 12x.
 
RAM came in, works fine! I ordered from this seller, they'll take an offer of $12.50 if you order more than one:


Works fine in the R4400 Indigo2, just ordered 16x more to finish filling up the Indigo2 and do the Indy as well!
 
CDROMs are so 2020- use booterizer and be up in under and hour. And then check out RSE so you can install amazing modern stuff.

Network install of 6.5.30, .22 and 5.3:
https://github.com/unxmaal/booterizer

RPM Software Enviroment (RSE):
https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse

Lots of useful SGI talk:
https://forums.sgi.sh/
 
Definitely doesn't load the forums...I tried it at lunctime just for laughs :)

Bought 4x 32MB FPM parity SIMMs to test, figured I'd make sure they work before buying 12x.

Netsurf is a bit more modern. No JS engine however...

 
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