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
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.
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
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.
