[rescue] SGI Crimsons and Challenge L found a new home

[Gerhard Lenerz]

Hello Francois,

Monday, March 8, 2004, 11:22:19 PM, you wrote:

> There are 2 half height and 2 full height 5.25" bays on my unit. I was
> thinking OS on 2 and my stuff on the other 2 drives. Is there any 
> particular strategy as far as partitioning/spindles that make these 
> things go faster?

  there is indeed. You could try if you can put a bare minimum OS on
  one disk and build a logical volume on the other disks that you use
  to store your $HOME or /usr/local or whatever on.

  I have such a setup on an Indigo (I admit it's running an older
  version of 6.5) with 3 1GB disks (*cough*). The first disk includes
  the base OS, the other 2 are striped together as a single volume
  that is mounted as /storage. I have some application stuff there
  with /usr/local actually being a symlink to the application dir on
  the storage volume.

  On Crimsons this is even better in terms of making good use of I/O
  bandwidth as you have 2 SCSI controllers you can place the drives
  on, which can give you additional bandwidth during accesses. I have
  some notes on setting up the SCSI buses on my Crimson page. It's
  actually just a matter of terminating the buses below the drivebays
  and attaching the SCSI cable that dangles down from the top of the
  cardcage to your IO3B board - if the system isn't already set up
  that way.

> I'm going to be compiling/running opengl stuff on them and probably
> set up a stereoscopic setup.

  Bad news: I never bothered too much with programming issues, but I
  think the first big iron graphics option with hardware support for
  Open GL is the Reality Engine. OGL still should work, with quite
  some performance penalty for running it on IRIS GL hardware. I hope
  I'm not mixing things up here...

> I'll have to pull the (modified for serial port) Mattel Powerglove
> out of the mothballs.

  *That* indeed sounds like an adventure.

>>  Using a recent CD-ROM shouldn't be a problem with either of your
>>  machines - Crimson or Challenge. For the Crimson it *might* be
>>  necessary that you are able to select the blocksize on the drive.
>>
> Where do you install it? And how do you select blocksize?

  I always used various Plextor drives (including 32x UltraPlex).
  These have a jumper for setting the blocksize to 512b. It might not
  be neccessary to do so, in any case it doesn't hurt.

>>  Or 5.3, if you happen to have a Crimson GTX.
> It's a Crimson with a VGXT video.

  Then 6.2 is ok for you. As for installing 6.2 on a Crimson I can't
  recall any specific problems. Maybe that was because mine always
  used disks that were used with 5.3 before.

  May I talk you into doing some test when you have one of them up and
  running? I'd be interested how VGXT performs in comparison to VGX. I
  have been hunting for VGXT Raster Manager boards quite a while, but
  so far I came up with nothing.


-- 
Best regards,
 Gerhard                            mailto:mail at g-lenerz.de

Old SGI Stuff                       http://sgistuff.g-lenerz.de/