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A yak shave with SGI's EFS

blog.pizzabox.computer

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Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#11

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Keyframe wrote: post #9

A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…

Pretty much weighs as much as a jet engine, too.

j/k, of course, but it's clearly the heaviest desktop system I've ever seen.

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#12

Post by __d »

puzzle wrote: post #7
octorian wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole 512 byte sector CD-ROM thing was common to all the 90's-era "Real UNIX" machines. They generally all wanted to treat CDs like a hard drive, for booting purposes. (PCs, on the other hand, did a different weird hack where they'd embed a floppy image at the state of the CD and the BIOS knew how to handle that.)

Yeah, you're right, they wanted 512 instead of 2048 bytes per sector to use the CD as a HD. But I think that at least one of the Unix vendors shipped the install media as 520 byte sectors, with 512 bytes of data and 8 bytes of checksum. In order to duplicate the discs, you needed to own a writer that was fancier than average (i.e. a SCSI unit, not an IDE one).

I keep a DEC RRD-40 drive (with its weird pre-caddy disc holder thing) around for the purpose of booting old DECstations. Not sure if it used 520B sectors though. I think I have the manual .. somewhere.

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#13

Post by Keyframe »

octorian wrote: post #10
Keyframe wrote: post #9

A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…

On the bright side, the Octane2 is one of the few SGI machines new enough to support graphics hardware with DVI ports.

I still had that 13w3 to something (might've even been a VGA), even though graphics was maxed out.

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#14

Post by Keyframe »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #11
Keyframe wrote: post #9

A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…

Pretty much weighs as much as a jet engine, too. j/k, of course, but it's clearly the heaviest desktop system I've ever seen.

Definitely heavy as a neutron star! TBH, the coolest looking one (to me at least) is/was Indigo 2. Both green and purple one! They ARE more manageable.

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#15

Post by randomdata »

Keyframe wrote: post #9

A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…

> SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day'

Back when I was in high school SGI brought their truck[1] full of all their toys to our school for the students to tour. That was a good day. I'll never forget the refrigerator-sized Onyx2 running a 3D flight simulator across three displays.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/cdTGzV8.jpg

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#16

Post by Taniwha »

puzzle wrote: post #4

Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?

I'm pretty sure it was apple who used 520 byte sectors, first on floppies, but also on Earl hard drives too

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#17

Post by barclay »

Keyframe wrote: post #14
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much weighs as much as a jet engine, too. j/k, of course, but it's clearly the heaviest desktop system I've ever seen.

Definitely heavy as a neutron star! TBH, the coolest looking one (to me at least) is/was Indigo 2. Both green and purple one! They ARE more manageable.

As an indigo^2 user: holy shit they were trinitron heavy, too. But the internals of that case were [stunningly beautiful](http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2/i2open.jpg).

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#18

Post by mrpippy »

octorian wrote: post #10
Keyframe wrote: post #9

A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then). There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at…

On the bright side, the Octane2 is one of the few SGI machines new enough to support graphics hardware with DVI ports.

It does support it, but the DCD card has always been expensive/rare. Also requires V10/V12 graphics, which are almost as expensive/rare.

Every Fuel has standard DVI, although Fuels have other drawbacks

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#19

Post by chrissnell »

I had a SGI Indy as my desktop machine in the mid-90s. It was a really awesome system at the time and I still miss it. A couple of random things that I remember:

- The 'lp' account (for the printing system) was not protected by a password on IRIX installs for the longest time. You could telnet in and exploit df(1) [1] and you'd have root. I obtained shells on a number of SGIs around the 'net in this manner back in the day. Good times!

- The author mentioned not being able to run EZSetup over an X11 session. As I recall, many of the graphical system utilities SGI's proprietary framework, which used some proprietary extensions that would not render over vanilla X11. The only way you could run them was from another SGI (using X11 forwarding) or from the local console. I'll bet this is why EZSetup never ran for you.

So much fun. I'm alllllmost tempted to go looking for an Indy on eBay. :)

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19274/

Re: A yak shave with SGI's EFS

#20

Post by cup-of-tea »

While interesting, a yak shave is where you go off on a long excursion to solve a problem that helps you solve the real problem. This, on the other hand, is just having a hobby. Calling it yak shaving doesn't seem appropriate.
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