Indigo2: What to watch out for?

[twylo]

Hello all,

I just picked up an Indigo2 Solid IMPACT and I have been reliving my misspent youth with great enjoyment and enthusiasm. I used SGIs at university around 1993 to 1995, and later I was lucky enough to work at SGI at the main campus in Mountain View in the mid 90s. After leaving, I maintained my love of SGI computers, but it's been over 20 years since I had an Indigo2 at home. Re-learning how to administer IRIX is kind of like riding a bike in that it's all coming back to me, but I feel like I've forgotten way too much!

Anyway, because these things just aren't getting any younger, I'm anxious about how I can keep my New-To-Me Indigo2 alive and well into the future, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on this forum have a lot more recent experience than I do. The system I have seems to have been used pretty recently, because the Dallas clock chip is still functioning (shockingly). I haven't had any trouble at all with the system, and I'd like to keep it that way.

What sort of things should I watch out for? Are there any "Must Do" maintenance items I need to take care of? Anything in the power supply likely to explode in the near future if not replaced?

 

[Elf]

Welcome! We are starting to see more Indigo 2 power supply failures, though not as bad as Indigo 1 or Indy yet. Preventative maintenance of replacing capacitors at least would not be a bad idea, although they can be somewhat annoying to pull apart.

I don't recall whether it is one of the covered models, but Glitchwrks ( https://www.tindie.com/stores/glitchwrks/ , also on forum) is producing replacements for the old Dallas RTCs that take a coin cell. Worth looking into if you expect it to go at some point, which we probably all should

 

[weblacky]

Glitch has a PCB but you need to crack open your old RTC module to connect it to underlying IC (original IC cannot be found NOS). I detailed this cracking open here: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-2512-post-17323.html

RTC PCB here: https://www.tindie.com/products/glitchwrks/gw-1286-1-dallas-ds1286-maintainable-repair-board/

Used 5-min epoxy to bond the two.

 

[Silicon Classics]

SGI in the mid-90s must have been one of the most incredible places to work! What did you do?

Other than potential power supply problems the I2 is a pretty solid machine.

 

[twylo]

SGI in the mid-90s must have been one of the most incredible places to work! What did you do?

It really was. I was fresh out of college and I was such an SGI fanboy, even now it remains my favorite job experience of all time. They treated their employees amazingly well, at least in the divisions I worked with.

I wish I could say that I'd worked on really cool hardware, but I was in their very early Intranet web division. We were in charge of creating websites and writing CGI web apps for internal use, and did lots of beta testing of things like Cosmo Create. I left in 1997, not long after the O2 and Octane became the big new products.

 

[Silicon Classics]

That's still pretty awesome. Must have been fun to get to use that kind of kit back in its heyday!