o2 Knife Edge

uunix

New member
Aug 6, 2019
6
2
3
Hey folks, still alive and kicking here. Hope the rest of you are good and living the dream.
I still have to go into work each day to ensure the backups are carried out, swap over the tapes and give the servers a physical kick every day. It’s quite blissful really. I see no one all day, have the building to myself and no one knows what the fsck I do. I can have a good hours kip in the afternoon and play music as loud as I want and drink a few cans.

Anyway, I’m still using the Tezro, Octane, IBM P5 and the VW’s running OS/2, but Thursday, I thought I’d take an o2 back home with me (since I have no SGI at home due to being confided into a corner of the house). Friday was 'good Friday' so would have SGI-less for over 4 days.

So I get the R5000 home, set it all up, install some apps and generally just make it nice. I’m running SoftWindows and using IBM PC 3270 emulator connected to PUB400.com and suddenly woooosh.. system crashed.

Restarted and no DISKS found. Checked the hinv in prom and there are no disks.. nor the CD Drive.. nor the actual adaptec controller.. WTF, it must have just exploded..

Today I go back to work and collect a load of o2 Boards and Power Supplies what not and see what I can find out. I did think maybe the PSU was giving a poor ampere causing the device to not kick in.. but that wasn’t it. On changing the board, it showed the SCSI controller… so basically, yes, it went poof in a flash of smoke. Never had that happen before.

I did bring back two R12/10000 units, one of which was 300MHZ R12000, the other a 225 MHz R10000. The R12, I knew to be broke, it yellow lights on power up. The case though is very nice, clean and of the latter type (which I like). So I swapped out the board and all was good. Added some memory from the other units and all was looking hunker dory.

Then I decided to swap out the CPU and would you Adam and Eve it.. all works fine. I always get the Covid sweats changing a CPU and it’s always a nerve wracking moment.

I’m going to fit a dual FC card into the unit and I have this very nice quiet Axel FC Array (housing 6 SATA drives), which currently has one 2TB Lun and 1TB run (both Raid 5), I’m sure that will be plenty.

The moral of my adventure is this.. Using SGI is like living on a knife edge! But fun!
 
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Jacques

Active member
Dec 21, 2019
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Somerset, United Kingdom
I still like me my R12k O2, though mine is a R10K 250Mhz Pimm modded to R12K 300Mhz. And I only have 384MB ram, would love to get it to 512mb, but that means either finding 4x64mb or 2x128mb dimms....Slim chance these days considering their cost!! I don't know if the original R12K pimm uses faster cache chips as my pimm runs quite hot.

I've never heard of an O2 board go poof though. Strangly both my O2 boards will not work with a standard PS2 mouse, they will only work with a USB mouse cconnected via a cheap PS2 -> USB converter plug. And I still cannot figure out why my O2 NFS speed is half that of my Octane. My O2 will not go above 5MB/s, while my Octane will happily sit at 9.6MB/s all day. I have quite old rev motherboards but I cannot see how the O2 would only do half the transfer rate over NFS. FTP is fine at 9.6MB/s though? Between my Octane and O2 I love the O2 most for 'tweak' potential...! :)

Keep well up in the midlands fella!

J
 

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