Building a Sleeper Computer from an SGI Indy | Hacker News Reader

Building a Sleeper Computer from an SGI Indy

buu342.me

62 pointsdanbolt49 comments

A friend of mine really liked the way the Cray-2 case looked. Those were hard to find, but when Tera was selling the empty case of a Tera/Cray MTA, he bought it for slightly more than $100. The MTA case is a blue, wavy plastic shell [0], about 5x8x7 feet (LxWxH)

He put his computer desk inside. He got tired of it within a few years and then used it as a garden shed for a while.

That case was odd because the wave shape was quite unnecessary. I guess someone told the designer "design a case, but don't just make it a rectangular box." Someone at Tera mentioned that it cost $60k to make. Presumably that's for the first one and subsequent copies were cheaper (I hope.) Inside the plastic shell was an extremely sturdy metal frame. The sides of the shell were held in place by electromagnets in the frame that were powered when the thing was plugged in. So the case had one power plug, and the machine had its own separate power supply. The machine itself used a lot of power and I think it needed more than just an ordinary 120/240V connection.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/x19zhIv

A Cray-2-like chassis would be a decorative way to arrange a cluster of GPUs. You don't need to gut a Cray-2: you could build a similar chassis. I'd be tempted to first try riveting an angle-bar frame, mount the GPUs with liquid cooling blocks and mobos and PSUs and networking, plexiglass, get some opaque plastic panels cut with windows, find some off-the-shelf pieces to round the corners, try to do the PCIe and Ethernet/fiber cabling aesthetically...

One place I worked had the storage array cabinet from a Connection Machine, which was outdated by that time, sitting in a lobby area.

http://www.svisions.com/sv/cm-dv.html

They sometimes used the cabinet as a bar counter at VIP events (with uniformed catering service bartender behind it, in the curve). I assume most people didn't know they were getting handed their glass of wine over a piece of history. I only knew because I recognized it and took a closer look.

Were those actually "das blinkenlights" on the front?

I think the curved cabinet in the background was the storage. It was a supporting role.

The CM visual/industrial design, including a little about das blinkenlights, is discussed by the designer, Tamiko Thiel, at: https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/

Disappointed it didn't have the boot tune in the video at the end

https://youtu.be/CH9saUP2460

I've often thought about doing sort of the opposite, putting a very high end machine in an SGI Onyx or HP 9000 case, but these machines are so rare and expensive that I'd be a shame to gut them just for a casemod. I've only seen a handful of these machines in a ruined condition but those were rusty, mouldy or crushed machines, so the case wasn't usable anymore, either.

especially the SGIs are afaik also somewhat famous for having really bad case materials that haven't aged well. And they're probably not popular enough to attract reproduction cases like various home computers and consoles do.

Really? I have an Indigo that's been sitting in my basement and it looks the same as when I put it there 20 years ago.

Not sure if it's all models? But some apparently crack really easily if handled/shipped nowadays

Back in the VA Linux days I observed SGI themselves do effectively the same thing during their death throes:

New "SGI" x86 linux cluster installed at fnal.gov having VA Linux faceplates. Weeks later SGI representative shows up and swaps out the face plates for more colorful SGI branded ones...

I once got a beautiful SGI Indigo² case for building a gaming PC into. It is also a "pizza-box" but I wanted to place it upright. But upright with the sides showing I wanted to avoid large unsightly holes for fans, so I struggled with the cooling solution. The original had used a single 92mm fan, but that wouldn't be enough for a modern PC.

I got close to cutting down a water-cooling radiator to 110 mm width to fit, to be used with rare 100 mm fans I had acquired. But eventually, I gave up and it is now just an empty decorative shell under my desk.

Awesome! also lucky the case is still fully intact, considering how often you see them getting cracked up and broken just due to moving them, etc. !

I bought an Octane case many years ago because I wanted to build a new PC in it. I soon realized that it was oddly small for such a big case and would take a lot of work. I sadly lost it, and now that I have more time and inclination, it’s a lot harder to find Octane cases.

I spent a lot of time in college computer labs filled with Indys. A good computer, with great monitors and keyboards.

Oh, I remembered, the Octane had its power supply at the -bottom- of the case, heating everything above it. From what I’ve read, Octane fans don’t have any variable speed control, they just run full tilt all the time.

On the plus side, it made them pretty stable, but thermally that was definitely a mistake.

The Octane fan actually had two speeds, "loud" and "concorde taking off in a hurricane".

The high speed fan mode would enable once you put enough expansion cards into the system. there was a pci card cage that would enable high speed and there were 4 proprietary slots where if more than two were inserted the system would get noisy(errr, more noisy).

apocryphal story, the graphics came in two sizes and two speeds. the large size was literally two of the small ones on one board but interleaved so while it had 8 mb of high speed rambus memory you could only use 4. anyway, the story goes that there was a very real risk on the large high speed gfx board of the memory getting so hot it would desolder itself from the board.

Edit: on the power supply location, I don't think that mattered, sgi's were not like a pc, they have an engineered airflow. air entered from the front and was forced through the compartments independently, on the left was the mainboard, in the middle there were three, bottom to top was the power supply, pci expansion, drive trays. and on the right a mainboard sized graphics card.

My Indy keyboard lasted from the day I bought my first Indy all the way up to about five years ago and I miss it still. Built like a tank, doesn't slide around the desk while using it, super nice keyboard action and with a little ps2/USB adapter still perfectly usable.

My eldest (re)built me an IBM keyboard that I hope to start using one of these days (the adapter seems to not like the keyboard all that much and it misses characters every now and then).

I've been wanting a Macintosh Quadra 700 case for years, so I can put an miniITX board into it. They are just really hard to get here, and I don't want to get a working one, or one that can be salvaged, just so I can gut the case.

Man I've got a soft spot for the old SGI machines - my dad used to sell them, and they were just the coolest machines out there at the time. I keep wanting to grab one off eBay, but I've just got absolutely nothing to do with it at all.

Some guy got Debian Sarge running on them, but the site is down :(

For when - and if - it comes back up again:

https://techfusion.ca/read.php?4,36

Wayback Machine has it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050526204126/https://techfusio...

Only one comment: you need to mod your bios to have it play the Indy startup sound :D

Really love this blue case. Makes me really sad that PC case makers don't really create nice non-tower PC cases anymore. There will come a time when the desk top orientation comes back and I can't wait.

The Cryorig Taku got a lot of attention a few years ago, but I don't think it sold well. Interesting concept though. Like a monitor shelf with keyboard drawer underneath. <http://www.cryorig.com/taku.php>

ooh nice, that does look good

I regularly use the SGI Indy keyboard. At this point, it's a sickly yellow-green with 'granite' flecks that make it look like it's The Pox incarnate, but the key movement is beautiful.

I have a real Indy, still works great.

My first "real" IT job was in a mom & pop ISP back in the late 1990's. The entire software side was running on an Indy running IRIX 5.3 when I started there. Fond memories.

Funny coincidence, mine was, too. The founder acquired the Indy from his previous employer, and it sat in a corner running DNS. There was a Windows box running a RADIUS server, and a Cisco 2501 router. The main office was also a PoP site, so there were a couple Hayes modem banks and a concentrator box. There were 5 other PoP sites around the state, because this was when calling a few towns away was "long distance".

I worked at an ISP that ran a couple of its web servers on Indy's. The hardware was nice, but IRIX 5.x was kind of a mess. It came out of the box with very loose security. X11 was open to the world (equivalent of "xhost +".) This meant anyone could key log you from remote if you were logged into the console.

Those days were a magical time for a teenager poking around. A lot of things were directly connected to the ‘net without a firewall or behind a NAT gateway. I wish I had the knowledge I have today back then.

I remember vividly. A friend literally "owned" a few local universities that had lax security, then gave out credentials to a bunch of other teens on some underground BBSes. They were hogging all the modem pools, compiling their own IRC clients on the university Sun boxes, and causing general mayhem. This went on for a while until they finally locked things down. The late 80's, early 90's were crazy times.

We had a build of ipfilter at the time installed, as we were aware of that. Even got OpenLDAP compiling for IRIX 5.3 and migrated all the local accounts into that, before building an UltraSparc 10 compatible server from parts from Sun Microelectronics and moving the LDAP server function to there. Those were the days.

My first webcam pic was taken on an IndyCam. It may be an Indigo without the go, but I still love the Indy. Many hours wasted as an undergrad on sgidoom.

I have an Indy and IndyCam as well as some SGI branded Polk Audio speakers sitting in my living room right now. Unfortunately it’s not in a working state. The person I got the memory from sold me had modules and it lacks a disk, and I’ve blown wayyy to much money in retrocomputers so I figure sadly it will likely end up in storage or sold.

I was going to try add support to my custom ISDN stack (yet another semi-abandoned project that likely won’t get completed) to be able to use the Indy’s ISDN interface. Who knows maybe sometime I’ll pick it up again.

I may be able to get you parts and/or may already have them. Are you in Europe or rather on the other side of some ocean?

Unfortunately across the ocean. I don’t think there’s much that needs to be replaced but tbh it was one of the last machines I’ve bought and haven’t played with it too much. if I recall correctly I mostly just need some working memory, a disk, and possible a specific “ramified timekeeper” if I’m not mixing up my computers.

To be honest the biggest thing preventing me from working on a lot of my retro computers is cost of to get USB<->SCSI interface lol.

SCSI2SD is the way these days.

Wow I don’t know how I missed this a few months back. I was convinced that my best option was to pay $200 for a some old ass USB to SCSI converter on eBay.

For $61 that's a steal.

https://store.rabbitholecomputing.com/ProductDetails.asp?Pro...

Especially given that any drive that old is likely not going to be very long for this world unless it was very well stored NOS.

I probably have a SCSI disk somewhere with IRIX on it suitable for Indy/Challenger but it hasn't spun in twenty years. Want me to start digging?

Probably also have some IRIX CDs, but here is a quicker way:

https://archive.org/download/irix53xfs/irix5.3xfs.img

SGI speakers? That’d go with my setup. Are they in that granite finish?

No the Polk Audio ones came a in a flatter grey color (though I have seen the granite speakers on eBay). These are the ones I have:

https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1824833

Looks like they were designed for a different SGI machine, but at the end of the day they’re just speakers.

Just kind of want the matching set. I'll go through the ad materials and figure out if they were for the Indy or not.

That cam is what launched the whole webcam rage in 1995 right from my office in Hoofddorp, NL. A few years later we were doing fashion shows, car races, shuttle launches and whatever else people wanted to see.

I was going to buy one back in the 1990s but I went for a tricked out PC instead because of games, LOL. I picked this one up a while later. Great little machine.

gonna be worth more down the line, and cooler, as an actual Indy

Old mac cheese grater g5 towers are some of the best cases for ATX conversions - they are pretty much all dead due to the coolant leaking into the PSU and motherboards and not viable/worth repairing, and the case design makes it easy to retofit an atx motherboard tray and PSU.

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