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My lab:
lab.png
Our department is shrinking so we are getting rid of everything that isn't used anymore and takes up space. On the pile of the defunct electronics I spotted an old SGI O2 workstation. These machines came to market back in the late 1990s and back then cost a fortune. The one from our department probably went up to about 1000DM (~5000€ or US$4000).
I was thrilled! These things are cult! I decided rather than let such a gem get dumped, I'd have a look at it and see if I could use it for something. It was in pretty bad shape: The second hdd was busted with part of the system residing there (e.g. the /usr directory). Apparently the CD-ROM was busted, too. So I went ahead and tried to get it to run.
Installing a new CD-ROM was easy - I had an old SCSI drive lying around which worked beautifully. Getting a new IRIX OS installed proved more difficult, though. none of the original software CDs could be found anywhere. Of course, there was no boot server anywhere in our network (after all, the machine is 10 years old!). Fortunately, Our central computing service (zedat) had the IRIX software licensed and shared on their NFS server. However, IRIX doesn't boot from NFS. I found this out by getting a Gentoo Mips LiveCD to boot on the O2 and trying it out (see pics). Well, at least I had one OS booting on the O2. I'll have to find out if a USB card works with this LiveCD. If it does, I'll get one to at least be able to transfer files via USB. I'll report more on the progress of getting the old thing back to life as it happens!

gentoo booting on SGI O2 gentoo login screen on SGI O2
Posted on Thursday 07 February 2008 - 14:10:20 comment: 0
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