Synack's Basement: Neko

I was perusing a friend's website to find that he had a page listing all of his computers, their origins, intended purpose, etc and realized that my pages of that nature have long past. Once upon a time I maintained a thorough inventory of all the random boxes in my basement, but my interest in most of them has waned and I found less and less of a need to keep track of them. However, I've made some interesting acquisitions of hardware over the last few years and thought that it might be a good idea to post some info on some of the more obscure ones.

That being said, I'm going to start this series with neko, an SGI O2 with a 200 MHz R5000 processor. A few years ago, I was visiting SUNY Geneseo's Distributed Systems lab with a group of students from one of my classes and noticed that there were quite a few of these odd shaped, strangely sexy looking boxes sitting around the lab. I inquired as to their status and was told that nobody would really mind if one of them went to a good home. We finished the tour and moved on, leaving the small pile of O2s behind.

Some time passed, and I got involved with more of Matt's classes in order to quench my thirst for technical knowledge. At some point, an O2 was handed to me complete with a hard drive. I took it home and attempted to boot the shiny new O2. But, as luck would have it, the O2 lacked any form of RAM and would serve only as a peculiar looking box in the corner of the basement for the time being. To make a long story short, I eventually found another O2 on eBay for $10, complete with RAM. The new O2's casing was nearly destroyed, but the internals still worked.

After a bit of swapping parts around and testing, I determined that the first O2 had a non-functional backplane and only a 180 MHz processor, whereas the new one sports a 200 MHz R5000 processor. I ended up transplanting the casing and hard drive from the original O2 to the new one. Once I had everything together, I booted into the SGI diagnostic console (a very peculiar BIOS, akin to OpenFirmware) and started to figure out what the system had in it with the 'hinv' command. I came to find that it only had 128 MB of RAM, not the 256 the eBay seller had advertised, but it did have a DVD-ROM drive that the seller had let slip by. After a bit of research, I found that DVD-ROM drives that work in an O2 without a BIOS patch were somewhat rare and I felt that this was a reasonable tradeoff for 128 MB less RAM.

I've attempted to install IRIX on the O2 twice now without success. I now know what people mean when they say that IRIX is... different. I did get NetBSD running on it at one point and found that it is extremely slow for most of the types of things I was trying to do with it (namely, compiling stuff out of ports). I eventually got tired of the constant chatter of its hard drive and pulled the plug. It sits in this state now.

At some point, I will attempt another install of IRIX on it, perhaps with the help of someone who has done it before. Eventually, I'd like to play with some of it's graphics capabilities. I think it'll make an excellent platform for playing with OpenGL code and possibly acting as an extremely lightweight MythTV frontend (I'll post more about this later).

This SGI O2, associated with the hostname 'neko' isn't exactly a very useful machine anymore, but it does have an aesthetic appeal that I enjoy, so it will remain in my basement for some time. As far as the spare parts from the other O2, I have this funny idea that it's about the right size to hold a six pack of soda cans...