Networking 4 sgi machines to share files

bjjames

New member
May 2, 2022
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Hello,

i have never been good at understanding network setups. I’m not looking to connect to the internet or PCs, all I want is to connect the SGIs via Ethernet cable so that I can share files and the O2 CD rom on other sgis. will The steps below work?

1. As a static IP address for each machine
2. Connect each machine to a network switch (4 port)
3. Not sure if it matters weather I use Cat 5, Cat 6, Cat7?.?
4. should I use a 4 port router or switch?

any comments are appreciated.. thanks
 

nuclear

Member
Jun 3, 2020
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nuclear.mutantstargoat.com
A 4 port switch will do fine, routers also usually work as switches if they have multiple ports, so you can use either.

Cat5 is perfectly fine, you probably don't have gigabit ethernet interfaces in your SGI computers, so no need for anything fancier. Cat5 will do 100mbit with ease.

Then as long as you have connected all of them together, set up NFS for file sharing.

Also you can connect them to the internet or non-SGI computers with the same setup and equipment. And at least other UNIX systems should also support NFS, though you might need to fiddle with configuration a bit to make the SGI NFS implementation work with modern say GNU/Linux NFS. But everything else should work exactly the same out of the box.
 
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bjjames

New member
May 2, 2022
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Thanks, looks like I’m on the right track. When setting up NFS, is there an application for this or is it withing the network settings…. Been a l9ng time since I messed with network settings.
 

massiverobot

irix detailer
Feb 8, 2019
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My suggestion is to buy the cheapest 8 port switch you can buy, buy the cheapest set of CAT5 cables (the SGI won't even use CAT5 levels of bandwith) you can buy and consider getting an older NAS (netgear or synology) and use that as the NFS server. you can also setup NFS on one of the SGIs if you install the option NFS packages. After they are cabled together and all on the same local network (you can ping each one from each one) then you just create the mount point for the shares and mount them.

You edit /etc/fstab to setup a permanent mount at boot time... I have this in my /etc/fstab:

192.168.251.5:/volume1/files /nfs/nas5/ nfs bg,soft,noatime,proto=tcp 1 1

for a synology storage applicance.

Make sure you set as bg (background) so that if you NFS server is ever offline it won't stop the SGI from booting fully - it will wait forever for the NFS server (and it's shares) to come back online. Google all the stuff about NFS servers and NFS clients and how to configure.
 
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