Another Silicon Graphics Origin 300, but this time with L1 Problems…
Picked up another Silicon Graphics Origin 300 (Dual 600/4gb ram), swapped in my Quad 500 board, replaced the fans and began my fun filled adventure into L1 Land.
My 2nd Silicon Graphics Origin 300
Original Silicon Graphics Origin 300 Fans out...
Quad R14k 500 Swap completed
Silicon Graphics Origin 300 1GB DDR Stick
Off the bat I was presented with:
Silicon Graphics Origin 300 L1 - Unknown Brick Type!
Upon hooking up my USB->Null Modem cable I checked the L1 Log:
001?01-L1>log
04/14/12 10:54:46 L1 booting 1.44.0
04/14/12 10:54:49 ** fixing invalid SSN value
04/14/12 10:54:49 ** fixing BSN mismatch
04/14/12 11:13:53 L1 booting 1.44.0
So, good it auto-fixed the invalid SSN and BSN mismatch.
001?01-L1>brick
rack: 001, slot: 01, partition: none, type: Unknown [2MB flash], serial:MRH006, source: NVRAM
Good again, it sees the brick, but doesn't know what it is.
Then tried:
001?01-L1>brick type C
brick type changed (nvram) (takes effect on next L1 reboot/power cycle)
001?01-L1>reboot_l1
Upon rebooting the L1, still not avail. Going to have to get creative with this problem...
SGI Origin 300 Quad 500 R14000 to Quad 600 R14000A
Been rocking my Quad 500mhz R14000 Silicon Graphics Origin 300 since replacing the fans in January, it's been great, but in preparation for the next 4 Quad 600mhz Origin 300s I plan on getting in May. That being said, I came across a Quad 600mhz R14000A on eBay. After going to Home Depot for a set of Torx drill bits, I was able to get the old board out and the new board in. Not only are each CPUs 100mhz faster, there is twice as much cache on the 600mhz versions.
Origin 300 MIPS Quad 600mhz R14000A Motherboard
Origin 300 MIPS Quad 600mhz R14000A Motherboard
4 600 MHZ IP35 Processors CPU: MIPS R14000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.4 FPU: MIPS R14010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 2.4 CPU 0 at Module 001c16/Slot 0/Slice A: 600 Mhz MIPS R14000 Processor Chip (enabled) Processor revision: 2.4. Scache: Size 4 MB Speed 300 Mhz Tap 0x1a CPU 1 at Module 001c16/Slot 0/Slice B: 600 Mhz MIPS R14000 Processor Chip (enabled) Processor revision: 2.4. Scache: Size 4 MB Speed 300 Mhz Tap 0x1a CPU 2 at Module 001c16/Slot 0/Slice C: 600 Mhz MIPS R14000 Processor Chip (enabled) Processor revision: 2.4. Scache: Size 4 MB Speed 300 Mhz Tap 0x1a CPU 3 at Module 001c16/Slot 0/Slice D: 600 Mhz MIPS R14000 Processor Chip (enabled) Processor revision: 2.4. Scache: Size 4 MB Speed 300 Mhz Tap 0x1a Main memory size: 2048 Mbytes Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes Data cache size: 32 Kbytes Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 4 Mbytes Memory at Module 001c16/Slot 0: 2048 MB (enabled) Bank 0 contains 1024 MB (Premium) DIMMS (enabled) Bank 1 contains 1024 MB (Premium) DIMMS (enabled) Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL12160, low voltage differential Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1) Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 2) Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL12160, low voltage differential IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty3 IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty4 Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, module 001c16, pci 4 PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1077, device 0x1216) PCI slot 1 PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x10a9, device 0x0003) PCI slot 4 PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x11c1, device 0x5802) PCI slot 5 IOC3/IOC4 external interrupts: 1 HUB in Module 001c16/Slot 0: Revision 2 Speed 200.00 Mhz (enabled) IP35prom in Module 001c16/Slot n0: Revision 6.124 USB controller: type OHCI
Silicon Graphics ALTIX 350 Arrived
Luckily and unluckily I noticed several Altix 350 Silicon Graphics 2U Servers on eBay starting at $9.99, ended up winning and getting them shipped to me for an extremely little amount, especially in comparison to the $200+ a single one usually goes for.
The unlucky part is that they didn't include a PCI Riser Card for the IO9 or IO10 pci card that has the Ethernet, SCSI/SATA connections etc. So I am on the hunt for some of both. Hopefully I can find one and then get a NUMALink cable to link two together and have a pretty neat MySQL Server.
Silicon Graphics ALTIX 350 in shipping box
Silicon Graphics ALTIX 350 insides
Silicon Graphics ALTIX 350 DIMM Layout
Silicon Graphics ALTIX 350 Empty PCI Bay
IRIX Disk Cloning/IRIX Hot Swapping
Last Sunday I was curious about IRIX root disk cloning, I had done it previously on an SGI Octane with a none root drive, but never on the root drive itself. Since I have 2 SGI O2s and 2 identical Maxtor Atlas II 15k 73gb Ultra 320 drives, it made sense rather than reinstalling everything just to clone it. Sure enough about 20 minutes later, I had an extra duplicate of my SGI O2 IRIX 6.5.30 install with all of my Nekoware packages (BASH, PHP, MySQL etc). Pulled it out and put into my other SGI O2, worked like a charm.
After doing some work on my SGI Origin 300 this morning, I figured I'd replace the failing Maxtor ATLAS 15k 36gb Ultra 320 drive with a brand new Fujitsu MAU3147 15k 36gb Ultra 320 drive. Not to mention the Maxtor had been making a terrible high pitch noise for some time before it ended up in the Origin 
Fujitsu in the Origin 300 Sled:
Fujitsu MAU ready to go for my Origin 300
After sliding it into my already powered Origin 300, I realized the SCSI ports weren't auto-scanning for changes. Some googling later, I found the Solaris equivalent of probe-scsi-all is scsiha -p 0; on IRIX.
Immediately following that running a hinv command:
4 500 MHZ IP35 Processors
CPU: MIPS R14000 Processor Chip Revision: 1.4
FPU: MIPS R14010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 1.4
Main memory size: 2048 Mbytes
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 3: Version Fibre Channel QL2200A
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL12160, low voltage differential
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL12160, low voltage differential
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty3
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty4
Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, module 001c16, pci 4
IOC3/IOC4 external interrupts: 1
USB controller: type OHCI
IRIX found the drive on Controller 0, so I was ready to begin the cloning procedure. Following these steps, 10 minutes later, I had my data copied to the Fujitsu drive and was ready to become my new root drive on my Origin 300.
Pretty cool Silicon Graphics built that in, cloning a Windows system drive is a huge pain natively. Although there is a sweet tool by Arconis if you own a Western Digital on there site, here for free. I used that when I moved off of my RAID 0 stripe of 2 Western Digital Black 500gb drives to the 1TB versions and didn't feel like reinstalling all of my applications including the ones that had limited activations without having to call the company to get them to reset the activations.
Maxtor, you've been good from 2004-2008 and from 2011-2012:
Maxtor ATLAS 15k 36gb drive, finally being retired
SGI Origin 300 FAN Swap and UUCP Fun
Finally got around to replacing the 4 80mm 40 decibel fans in my Origin 300 this morning. The noise from this one server was enough to travel from the basement inside a rack all the way to the 3rd floor Master Bedroom. Suffice it to say, I definitely couldn't run the server 24/7. Hunting around on Amazon, I found these 80mm Cooler Master fans, not too bad price wise and still put out decent air flow.
New Cooler Master 80mm replacement fans for my SGI Origin 300
Prep for the swap:
My Quad R14k SGI Origin 300
The original fan in case someone needed a part number:
SGI Origin 300 Stock Fan
As I was swapping in the new fans, I realized the fan connector was not the standard ATX style.
Stock Connector:
Stock SGI Origin 300 Fan Connector
Versus the standard ATX connector:
Repacement Cooler Master Fan ATX Connector
Luckily the standard 4 pin Molex power connector for the 2 Ultra 160 drives is right next to the fans, so a little wiring job and voila:
SGI Origin 300 with replacement fans installed
Note, doing it this way will throw an error in the L1 Console and will shut your machine down. A way around it is to simply connect to the Origin 300 over a console connection and type:
env off.
This is dangerous though as the server will not shutdown automatically if a fan fails or the server overheats.
Having said that, it came to my attention that IRIX does not install a Serial/Terminal client by default. The common cu is on the IRIX 6.5 Foundation CD 1 disk. Turn on the Subsystems Only in the IRIX Software Manager and scroll down until you see it. Chances are you're not running a base 6.5 install so you'll also need the first disk of your overlays (6.5.30 Overlay CD 1 in my case) in order to install it to resolve the package conflicts.
After installing you may receive a "CONNECT FAILURE: NO DEVICES AVAILABLE".
Open up vi or your favorite text editor and open up /etc/uucp/Devices
Add in a line:
Direct ttyd2 - 38400 direct
Make sure the spaces are there.
You can also try setting it up via the Serial Manager under the System Manager application.
Afterwards, simply running:
cu -l /dev/ttyd2 -s38400
Allowed me into my L1 console to turn off environment monitoring. Then hit Control + D to get back into the PROM Monitor and hit "1" to start IRIX.
Quake 2 IRIX > 128mb doesn’t seem to matter (much)
Just benchmarked my 180mhz R5000SC cpu with only 128mb of memory in Quake 2, it's marginally worse than when I benchmarked the same CPU, but with 1gb of memory. This makes sense though in that back in 1997 when Quake 2 came out, I think I only had just upgraded to 32mb of ram in my Pentium 200 MMX running Windows NT 4. So all the extra ram wouldn't help this scenario.
The one major caveat I noticed was running in a 320x240 window @ 640x480, my O2 ran out of memory and started paging to the Virtual Memory (thank you gmemusage). I tested it twice to make sure, but a word to the wise, do not run Quake 2 in a window if you only have 128mb of memory. I'll test it out with 192mb shortly.
In case anyone was interested here is an updated list:
320x240
128mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 4.1 / 169.6 seconds
1024mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 14.9 / 46.3 seconds
1024mb - 300mhz R5200SC - 18.8 / 36.7 seconds
640x480
128mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 12.2 / 56.3 seconds
1024mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 12.4fps / 55.4 seconds
1024mb - 300mhz R5200SC - 14.5fps / 47.4 seconds
800x600
128mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 10.2 / 67.3 seconds
1024mb - 180mhz R5000SC - 10.3 / 67.2 seconds
1024mb - 300mhz R5200SC - 11.7 / 58.7 seconds
SGI O2 – Maxed out Memory
Found a guy on Craigslist who was selling his O2, didn't know the specs other than it was not a R10k or R12k model, but offered it for $50. The going rate on eBay for O2 parts is generally higher than that, so I took a gamble. Surprisingly, the O2 was the lowest end CPU, but had 8 128mb sticks of memory, the max you can pop in an O2. One pair of these go for over a hundred bucks on eBay. I migrated all of my memory out of my O2 and swapped it in, voila 1GB for $50 and now I've got an "extra" O2 that I'll probably use to record guitar riffs.
Silicon Graphics O2 showing the 1GB of RAM
I tried Quake II, it boots up a little bit quicker, but FPS wise, I didn't notice a difference.
Quake II on IRIX
I figured after attempting to compile SDLQuake and running into x86 assembly, UDP and linking issues I decided to try the "official" IRIX port from SGI. Oddly enough, Quake II runs at 640x480x16 with full textures on my Silicon Graphics O2. Feeling adventurous, I wanted to see if it would play with the x86 Windows 3.20 version. Sure enough, I was able to play with an IRIX hosted game (it would probably work the other way as well) with my Windows 7 workstation.
Quake II on my O2
On a side note, I got SDLQuake to get all the way to the linking stage before giving up on it. For whatever reason using -lSDL was not including what looks like X11 or OpenAL libraries. I included both of those libraries and was still getting the errors.
Computer Speed…Well…Relatively
Been working on my Silicon Graphics O2 a lot and surprisingly it's pretty responsive for directory browsing, C/C++ source code editing/compiling and software installation. For a 16 year old 180mhz machine with only 192mb of memory I am really shocked what an optimized and lightweight operating system can do. For web browsing, FLAC music playing etc, it won't stand up against my Phenom II X6, but for everything I'm doing, it is neck and neck.
This thought got my thinking, everyday new cpus/apus, gpus etc come out, the last generation is put into bargain bins or rebadged as a lower end part of the next generation. I'm voting to rethink "computer performance", at least its definition. If someone running Microsoft Word, Zune and Chrome on a Windows 7 machine with 6 cores and 16gb ram notices no difference when he or she is on 2 core, 4gb ram system, then why justify the badging of that machine as a lowerend? To me it is all relative to what you're actually doing. I can browse to a C++ file from a terminal window, open it in vi and start editing on my SGI O2 faster than I could open up Visual Studio 2010, then browse to the project and start coding on my Phenom II system. It saddens me to know that so many people will frown upon not top of the line specs even if they are only going to use 50% of the power available. Gluttony it seems has taken hold of consumers...
Silicon Graphics O2 has arrived!
Well actually it did on Tuesday, but just finally got it in working state last night with SSH, BASH and SAMBA. I had a spare Maxtor Atlas II 15k 73gb Ultra 320 SCA drive that I replaced the existing Quantum 10k 9gb, it's now both quiet and pretty fast considering it's one cpu away from being the lowest end O2 and it's 14-15 years old.
Silicon Graphics O2
Silicon Graphics O2 Startup Menu
Next on the todo list is get GCC setup along with NEDIT so I can start programming on it.
IRIX Root Drive Cloning a success!
A picture says a thousand words:
IRIX-6.5.30-running
Now to actually get MySQL, PHP etc on it like I wanted to last summer
IRIX on my Origin 300, well sort of…
Spent virtually every evening this week working on my Origin 300 I got last summer and finally got to this point:
IRIX 6.5.30 Launching
Called it a night at around 12:30 this morning after getting BASH, Samba, SSH, TightVNC on it, figuring I would wake up and get it running pretty quickly.
And I did to some extent:
IRIX 6.5.30 over VNC
Not exactly exciting to see, but an improvement over a console/ssh/telnet session.
After some more configuring, started to get when running 4Dwm (IRIX's Windowing Manager, think of it like GNOME or KDE)
Media Error: Unrecovered data block read errors
Googling the error (and just intuition), the hard drive I spent all week prepping, installing and getting frustrated on is on it's way out.
Luckily I remembered from years back upgrading a drive in my origin Silicon Graphics Octane you can pretty easily clone a root drive. Pulled up this link over at the SGI Depot. Followed the steps, tons of errors followed when copying. Crossing my fingers upon pulling out the original installation drive...
SGI 330 Arrived and Updated
Finally got a Silicon Graphics Visual Workstation 330. Not a traditional Silicon Graphics by any means, but the case was neat and fufills a nostalgic purpose.
SGI VS 330 in box
SGI VS 330 Sideview
Not wanting to be limited to Dual Pentium 3 933mhz CPUs and no SATA support, I used a spare CPU, ram and motherboard I had laying around.
Asus M4A89GTD/USB3, Corsair XMS3 16gb, Athlon II X3 435 and Crucial 64gb
In addition I swapped out the rear fan, being 11 years old it was quite noisy. I had a spare CoolerMaster 120mm low-rpm Blue LED fan that fit perfectly in the back. All in all, pretty smooth swap. Downloaded the Network Install CD of OpenSuse 12.1, installed it and was ready to go in under an hour.
In it's completed form:
Completed swap of parts out of the SGI VS 330
All that's left now is to de-scuff the case to bring it back closer to a new state.
IRIX at last
Years ago when I was a kid I was enamored by Silicon Graphics. My father spoke highly of them and I saw what they were able to produce in the movies I loved. In high school I had wanted a then new, Octane 2. They were around $14,000 back then. A few years later in 2004/2005, I broke down and spent around $300 on an Octane I. Finally got an Octane II in 2007, but needed cash so I sold off all of my Silicon Graphics equipment.
Fast forward until last summer, Origin 300s finally came down to a reasonable price point (~$120), picked up a Quad R14k, 2GB Origin 300 with a Fiber Channel PCI-X card. Only kicker was it didn't have any drives and being an Origin 300, no cd/dvd drive and no video card either. Busy with other stuff, I left it sitting in my "stack". Last night, UPS delivered, IRIX at last!
IRIX 6.5.4 Installation CDs
Still waiting on the drives I bought, found a guy on eBay who had 3 Maxtor Atlas 15K IIs for dirt cheap. One step closer to getting it finally setup