This is a (by no means comprehensive) list of vendors for 2nd hand SGI kit. Many of them I’ve used myself.

• Ian Mapleson’s SGI Depot

  Ian has refreshed his site, and has a lot of good stuff for sale. I can recommend his CD sets and OS installs – he knows what he’s doing, and you end up with a very usable machine.

• SGD Systems

  Check out their clearance offers. They also tend to have a good stock of older parts.

• Rapid Technology Partners

  I bought a load of Indys from them when Ian Mapleson was helping them clear a large amount of stock. Worth talking to – they have some good deals.

• SGI Warehouse

  I haven’t dealt with Neil Stevenson, but Ian had some systems listed and the prices seem good.

• 13W3

  I’ve dealt with Ian before – good prices, and he usually has some goodies in the software section.

• Cordnet

  Their website tends to be a bit out of date, but Cordnet have some good deals, and a large stocklist. Well worth giving them a call to see if they have what you need in stock.

• Danic Ltd.

  Danic have some good stock and fairly keen prices – worth calling, as not all their stock list is online.

• AM IT Solutions

  Formed by one of the chaps from RTP. Their website doesn’t have much stock listed, but they do good deals on older kit. Worth calling.

• Reputable Systems

  Greg Douglas has excellent prices and is a great guy to deal with. Get one of his LED light bars for your Octane!

• Mini Computer Exchange

  MCE have a good range of stuff, and quick international shipping.

• B & B Solutions Inc.

  Based in Canada, they have some insane deals. Good guys to deal with

• SGI Remarketed Products

  Refurbished and off-lease kit direct from SGI.

• Mashek Systems

  Haven’t dealt with him, but his prices can be good. Usually has a good stock of VW 320s.

• XS International

  I’ve heard good things about them, and they seem to have a good list of parts and systems.

SGI has their complete publications library online – Owner’s Manuals, Man Pages, Release Notes, the lot.

The URL is http://techpubs.sgi.com.

Their Technical Publications are also available as downloadable PDFs.

There is a range of different operating systems available for various machines produced by SGI. The main SGI Operating System home page can be found here.

• IRIX is SGI’s SVR4 based Unix.
  The IRIX hompage can be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/irix/index.html

• Windows NT – SGI’s Visual Workstation range were Intel-based workstations running NT 4. Although there was a port of NT to MIPS, none of the MIPS powered SGI machines will run NT.
  The SGI NT home page used to be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/nt/index.html. Check out http://www.webarchive.org to see if there are any archived pages left.

• Linux – SGI’s most recent range of servers are powered by Intel processors and run Linux. SGI has been quite active in the Linux community, extending existing parts of Linux, and making available SGI developed enhancements.
  The SGI Linux home page can be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/linux/index.html

• Linux on SGI – the Linux on SGI home pages cover an SGI port of Linux to run on the Visual Workstations, as well as a MIPS port to run on the SGI Indy.
  The Linux on SGI home page can be found at http://www.linux.sgi.com

• NetBSD – there is a port of NetBSD to some of SGI’s MIPS based boxen.

If you’d like to see what SGI has been up to in the Open Source community, SGI has a page up within Developer Central.

XFS is SGI’s scaleable, high performance extent-based filesystem. CXFS is an evolution of XFS that allows multiple clients to access the same filesystem at the same time on your SAN.

As systems scale and data volumes grow, access to, and manipulation of that data becomes a serious bottleneck.

I’ve found that many people are unaware of CXFS, or it’s benefits, and in general there’s a fair amount of confusion over the difference between concurrent access to a SAN filesystem versus shared cluster filesystems, as provided by something like Clustered VxFS.

So, I’ve collected together some documents and information which will give a good grounding on CXFS, and hopefully help show what an impressive feat it is.

DMF – Data Migration Facility – is a valuable tool that can live off the back of CXFS. You might be familiar with the concepts of HSM – Hierarchical Storage Management. DMF is pretty much the same thing.

• SGI’s CXFS page
• CXFS Administration Guide from Techpubs
  • Local copy
• Local copies of:
  • CXFS datasheet
  • CXFS whitepaper
• Los Alamos National Laboratory CXFS briefing
  R. Kent Koeniger’s April 1999 briefing – a very good overview
  • Local Mirror
• Backing up and Restoring multi-terabyte datasets

  A white paper where SGI demostrate 10TB per hour backup throughput

  • Local Mirror
• NCAR Visualisation and Enabling Technologies
  A report detailing CXFS performance
  • Local Mirror
• SGI Mobile Innovation Centre at University of Waterloo
  Notes from SGI’s MIC visit to UWaterloo in September 2003 – details of CXFS and DMF
  • Local Mirror
• Scaleability and Performance in Modern Filesystems
  An SGI paper comparing UFS, XFS, VxFS and NTFS – a good overview of XFS and how it works, and how that compares to other common filesystems
  • Local Mirror

I highly recommend not only checking out http://freeware.sgi.com but also pages on the Other Sites page for other software.

FSN – the 3D File System Navigator

Download: fsn.tar.Z

Not one I’ve written myself, but this is the ELF binary of the famous FSN, which featured in Jurassic Park. You can find out more by reading this post.

All the other applications on this page have been compiled using GCC under IRIX 6.5 on my Octane

Root disk cloning script

Download: clone_root_disk.ksh

The XLV/XVM plexing option is expensive – very expensive. Yet everyone needs a backup of their root disk. This korn script can be run nightly from cron, and will clone your root disk. All you need is another disk in the machine, which has already been partitioned by fx, and away you go!
The script is pretty straightforward, so can easily be modified to clone other important disks in your machine.

Quake, Quake2, and mods

Version: Quake2 3.20

Download: SGI Quake local mirror

Dug out from an old backup tape, here’s my mirror of the SGI Quake pages from SGI’s website. Quake, Quake2, plus some entertaining mods like Action Quake 2.

Allegro

Version: 4.1.9 (unstable branch)

Download: allegro-4.1.9.tardist

Allegro is a cross-platform gaming library – similar to SDL. Off the top of my head, you’ll need ESD installed to get sound. There’s an ESD tardist on the SGI Freeware website.

The Allegro homepage can be found at http://sunsite.dk/allegro

Elite:TNK

Version: 1.0

Download: elite-tnk.tardist

Elite is the greatest computer game known to man. Ever. Elite:TNK is the result of a project by Christian Pinder to reverse-engineer Elite from the original BBC disk version.
This requires Allegro, and runs splendidly on my Octane. It installs in /usr/local/elite-tnk, and the binary (newkind) must be run from within there.

The Elite:TNK home page used to be found at http://www.cjpinder.clara.net/elite.html, but this site now appears to be dead.

ActX

Version: 1.2.1

Download: actx-1.2.1.tardist.gz

ActX is a collection of anime window sitters (Active X Window System).

The home page can be found at http://kurumi.sakura.ne.jp/~chimari

AkaneClock

Version: 0.31

Download: akaneclock-0.31.tardist

AkaneClock is an excellent anime clock. Lots more fun to have sitting on your desktop than the normal clock.

The home page can be found at http://kurumi.sakura.ne.jp/%7Echimari/ActX

aterm

Version: 0.4.2

Download: aterm-0.4.2.tardist

aterm is my preferred terminal. It allows background transparency, and with the Buffy GTK theme fits right in with the Indigo Magic desktop.

The home page can be found at http://aterm.sourceforge.net/

PRNGD

Version: 0.9.24

Download: prngd-0.9.24.tardist

PRNGD is the Pseudo Random Number Generator Daemon – a source of entropy. You’ll need a decent source of entropy for any cryptographic applications – OpenSSL, for example. PRGND saves any entropy it has when it’s shutdown – this means you have a strong source of entropy right from when your machine boots. It also doesn’t generate a ‘pool’ of entropy, so, unlike EGD, it can’t be drained and won’t block.

The home page can be found at http://www.aet.tu-cottbus.de/personen/jaenicke/postfix_tls/prngd.html

GnuPG

Version: 1.0.6

Download: gnupg-1.0.6.tardist

GNU Privacy Guard is an OpenPGP compliant Open Source replacement for PGP. Personally, I’ve used PGP 2.6.3i for donkeys years, but more and more software appears to be written to use GnuPG specifically – hence this tardist. This version isn’t the most recent, but works fine for me. I may build a newer tardist sometime if there is enough demand.

The home page can be found at http://www.gnupg.org/

zlib

Version: 1.1.4

Download: zlib-1.1.4.tardist

zlib is a compression library. Pretty much anything that will use compression will need this. This version fixes some potential security flaws with previous versions. Note that any applications statically compiled against older versions will need to be re-compiled against this new version to use the fixes.

The home page can be found at http://www.gzip.org/zlib/