So, this year I had a new-year’s resolution of sorts… when we first started this “work from home” journey due to China’s “gift”, I just temporarily set up on the dinner table, which was of course, meant to be another few months.
Well, nearly 2 years later, we’re still working from home, and work has expanded to the point that a move to the office, on any permanent basis, is pretty much impossible now unless the business moves to a bigger building. With this in mind, I decided I’d clear off the dinner table, and clean up my room sufficiently to set up my workstation in there.
That meant re-arranging some things, but for the most part, I had the space already. So some stuff I wasn’t using got thrown into boxes to be moved into the garage. My CD collection similarly got moved into the garage (I have it on the computer, but need to retain the physical discs as they represent my “personal use license”), and lo and behold, I could set up my workstation.
One of my colleagues spotted the Indy and commented about the old classic SGI logo. Some might notice there’s also an O2 lurking in the shadows. Those who have known me for a while, will remember I did help maintain a Linux distribution for these classic machines, among others, and had a reasonable collection of my own:
These machines were all eBay purchases, as is the Sun monitor pictured (it came with the Octane). Sadly, fast forward a number of years, and these machines are mostly door stops and paperweights now.
The Octane’s and Indigo2’s demises
The Octane died when I tried to clean it out with a vacuum cleaner, without realising the effect of static electricity generated by the vacuum cleaner itself. I might add mine was a particularly old unit: it had a 175MHz R10000 CPU, and I remember the Linux kernel didn’t recognise the power management circuitry in the PSU without me manually patching it.
The Indigo2 mysteriously stopped working without any clear reason why, I’ve never actually tried to diagnose the issue.
That left the Indy and the O2 as working machines. I haven’t fired them up in a long time until today. I figured, what the hell, do they still run?
Trying the Indy and O2 out
Plug in the Indy, hit the power button… nothing. Dead as a doornail. Okay, put it aside… what about the O2?
I plug it in, shuffle it closer to the monitor so I can connect it. ‘Lo and behold:
Of course, the machine was set up to use a serial console as its primary interface, and boot-up was running very slow.
It sat there like that for a while, figuring the action was happening on a serial port, I went to go get my null modem cable, only to find a log-in prompt by the time I got back.
Next was remembering what password I was using when I last ran this machine. We had the OpenSSL heartbleed vulnerability happen since then, and at about that time, I revoked all OpenPGP keys and changed all passwords, so it isn’t what I use today. I couldn’t get in as root, but my regular user account worked, and I was able to change the root password via sudo.
The machine soon crashed after that. I tried rebooting, this time I tweaked some PROM settings (and yes, I was rusty remembering how to do it) to be able to see what was going. (I had the null modem cable in hand, but didn’t feel like trying to blindly find the serial port at the back of my desktop.)
Evidently, I had a dud disk. This did not surprise me in the slightest. I also noticed the PSU fan was not spinning, possibly seized after years of non-use.
Okay, there were two disks installed in this machine, both 80-pin SCA SCSI drives. Which one was it? I took a punt and tried the one furtherest away from the I/O ports.
I managed to reset the root password, before the machine powered itself off (possibly because of overheating). I suspect the machine will need the dust blown out of it (safely! — not using the method that killed the Octane!), and the HDDs will need replacements. The guilty culprit was this one (which I guessed correctly first go):
The computer I’m typing this on has a HDD that stores 1000 of these drives. Today, there are modern alternatives, such as SCSI2SD that could get this machine running fully if needed. The tricky bit would be handling the 80-pin hot-swap interface. There’d be some hardware hacking needed to connect the two, but AU$145 plus an adaptor seems like a safer bet than trying some random used HDD.
So, replacement for the HDDs, a clean-out, and possibly a new fan or two, and that machine will be back to “working” state. Of course the Linux landscape has moved on since then, Debian no longer support the MIPS4 ISA that the RM5200 CPU understands, Gentoo still could work on this though, and maybe OpenBSD still support this too. In short, this machine is enough of a “go-er” that it should not be sent to land-fill… yet.
Turning my attention back to the Indy
So the Indy was my first SGI machine. Bought to better understand the MIPS processor architecture, and perhaps gain enough understanding to try and breathe life into a Cobalt Qube II server appliance (remember those?), it did teach me a lot about Linux and how things vary between platforms.
I figured I might as well pop the cover and see if there’s anything “obviously” wrong. The procedure I was rusty on, but I recalled there was a little catch on the back of the case that needed to be release before the cover slid off. So I lugged the 20″ CRT off the top of the machine, pulled the non-functioning Indy out, and put it on the table to inspect further.
Upon trying to pop the cover (gently!), the top of the case just exploded. Two pieces of the top cover go flying, and the RF shield parts company with the cover’s underside.
I was left with a handful of small plastic fragments that were the heat-set posts holding the RF shield to the inside of the lid.
Clearly, the plastic has become brittle over the years. These machines were released in 1993, I think this might be a 1994-model as it has a slightly upgraded R4600 CPU in it.
As to the machine itself, I had a quick sticky-beak, there didn’t seem to be any immediately obvious things, but to be honest, I didn’t do a very thorough check. Maybe there’s some corrosion under the motherboard I didn’t spot, maybe it’s just a blown fuse in the PSU, who knows?
This particular machine had 256MB RAM (a lot for its day), 8-bit Newport XL graphics, the “Indy Presenter” LCD interface (somewhere, we have the 15″ monitor it came with — sadly the connecting cable has some damaged conductors), and the HDD is a 9.1GB HDD I added some time back.
Where to now?
I was hanging on to these machines with the thinking that someone who was interested in experimenting with RISC machines might want them — find them a new home rather than sending them to landfill. I guess that’s still an option for the O2, as it still boots: so long as its remaining HDD doesn’t die it’ll be fine.
For the others, there’s the possibility of combining bits to make a functional frankenmachine from lots of parts. The Indy will need a new PROM battery if someone does manage to breathe life into it.
The Octane had two SCSI interfaces, one of which was dead — a problem that was known-of before I even acquired it. The PROM would bitch and moan about the dead SCSI interface for a good two minutes before giving up and dumping you in the boot menu. Press 1, and it’d hand over to arcload, which would boot a Linux kernel from a disk on the working controller. Linux would see the dead SCSI controller, and proceed to ignore it, booting just fine as if nothing had happened.
The Indigo2 R10000 was always the red-hedded step child: an artefact of the machine’s design. The IP22 design (Indy and Indigo2) was never designed with the intent of being used with a R10000 CPU, and the speculative execution features played havoc with caching on this design. The Octane worked fine because it was designed from the outset to run this CPU. The O2 could be made to work because of a quirk of its hardware design, but the Indigo2 was not so flexible, so kernel-space code had to hack around the problem in software.
I guess I’d still like to see the machines go to a good home, but no idea who that’d be in this day and age. Somewhere, I have a partial disc set of Irix 6.5, and there’s also a 20″ SGI GDM5410 monitor (not the Sun monitor pictured above) that, at last check, did still work.
It’ll be a sad day when these go to the tip.
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