[ale] SCSI CDROM

[Dow Hurst]

Hey James,
If you want to bring it over here, I can help you out.  I've got a lab 
full of SGIs you could stick your drive in to partition and such.  I 
have two external CDROMs, one is a CDwriter.   You have a nice machine 
for graphics there.  It can become quite useful once you've got the SGI 
freeware loaded up.  I am taking off the week but would be happy to help 
you if your interested.  I could meet you at KSU anytime this week.  In 
fact, I am here right now and will be until about 7pm.  We are working 
on a paper that has to get to the publishers right away so my weekend is 
getting traded for weekdays!  Call me here at the office.
Dow


James P. Kinney III wrote:

>I think my (only) scsi cdrom is is flaking out. I'm trying to load IRIX
>onto an SGI Octane and some of the cdrom access works and other parts
>(deeper than one or two directories) fail with either a scsi error (in
>sash) or a hard lock after a screen of gripes (in miniroot).
>
>Does anyone have an external scsi CDROM that supports 512k blocks that I
>can borrow for a day to test this mess. It may also be the external scsi
>fast-wide scsi bus is bad on the Octane itself  :-{
>
>Also, the efs filesystem support in kernel-2.4.19 is really crappy. It
>segfaults all over. But (!) I was able to make an SGI partition label on
>a drive, create proper SGI partitions format with xfs, and through
>numerous contortions, get a rudimentary miniroot and a few tools loaded
>onto the drive. I can't directly mountand SGI cdrom. They use efs
>filesystem, not iso9660. If I dd the image to a local file, I can
>loopback mount it as an efs file system. I guess the cdrom device code
>is too tied to iso9660 format to allow direct access with a different
>format.
>
>At any rate, if someone has an external scsi CD I can borrow for a day,
>I'll be ecstatic to come pick it up and bring it back!
>
>Oh, yeah. tftpbooting an SGI with a Linux server doesn't seem to work
>either. I can see that the request is received and a reply sent, but the
>Octane doesn't like the reply so it keeps requesting.  I was able to
>remote boot my HP C160 using this setup to upgrade a firmware issue and
>install Pa-Linux so I know the process does work. I found some info
>about some no-fragment kernel network setting that needed to be set. It
>didn't help though. The SGI boxes with that complaint were the much
>older Indys. 
>
>SGI Octane dual 195MHz, 256Mram, 2x4G drives, SSI graphics (dual GPU's)
>and a wife who has forbidden me to EVER look at Ebay again.
>  
>

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd., Bldg. 12
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
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*Computational Chemistry is fun!*
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