Student_Tech's Journal: Less than 1 month left

Got less than a month left of school this year. Can't say too much. At the surplus auction a few weeks ago bought an SGI Crimson with the Reality Engine and a AlphaServer 2100 (sans I/O board, CPU, and memory) and a Sun SparcStation IPC for $10. Ended up spending $35 to make a cable to plug the SGI in the laundry room because it has a 20 amp outlet. No monitor so we have done everything via the serial console so far. From what it looks like it was used for VR in the Mechanical Engineering part of the school, at least when it was first booted up that was who it was trying to call home to. Also asking the admin over there he had heard of the machine, but had never actually used it. We (my friend and I) guess it might have been worth $75Kish new in 1992-4. This machine at least has Irix 6.2 on it with the XFS file system. We didn't have the root password, but linux with XFS support fixed that once we got a SCSI card. We were glad because we A) No Irix Disc, and B) If it had been EFS (precursor to XFS) linux only has read-only support for that.

The alphaserver, so far we have purchased: I/O board, 275/4 Processor, and 128MB memory board. We also got the old hard drives (different lot, those cost $5) for it. It at least has EISA and PCI in it so we can hopefully just drop in any random video card in it. Linux is gonna go on that alpha as well I think. We know that it was IT's and they pulled parts before it went to surplus because they had another machine the parts could be used in so that is why we are buying so many parts.

The sparcstation is going to be Solaris 7 I think, it is a cute little box and if the memory wasn't so funny on it we would have linux on it as well (Ramdisk troubles). I haven't used NetBSD which I understand handles the memory problem much better.

Both the SGI and the Sparcstation have AUI ports for ethernet and we haven't bought any transceivers for them yet, and they don't like the cross over cable we made to connect them to a hub with an AUI port.