
A yak shave with SGI's EFS - AzMoo_
https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/sgi-efs-yakshave/
======
spilk
Good to see some folks using my 'irixboot' utility in the wild. Looks like it
worked!

Also, the whole process by which the Development CD image is extracted could
have been easily handled by irixboot and you can use irixboot as a 'dist'
install source within the already-installed OS.

~~~
dmix
It's always great randomly coming across something you wrote in the past,
isn't it? Even if it's only a small blog post.

------
Keyframe
A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS
and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially
for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they
were a highway robbery back then).

There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your
desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at
all. Now I know why we kept only O2s on desktops and Octanes were in 'server
room' when we did work on them.

~~~
octorian
On the bright side, the Octane2 is one of the few SGI machines new enough to
support graphics hardware with DVI ports.

~~~
mrpippy
It does support it, but the DCD card has always been expensive/rare. Also
requires V10/V12 graphics, which are almost as expensive/rare.

Every Fuel has standard DVI, although Fuels have other drawbacks

------
ddumas
Very fun read. There is something really enjoyable about stories of people
solving the problem at hand in the most straightforward way possible, even
when that means digging into all kinds of low-level details that are usually
abstracted away for us.

------
chrissnell
I had a SGI Indy as my desktop machine in the mid-90s. It was a really awesome
system at the time and I still miss it. A couple of random things that I
remember:

\- The 'lp' account (for the printing system) was not protected by a password
on IRIX installs for the longest time. You could telnet in and exploit df(1)
[1] and you'd have root. I obtained shells on a number of SGIs around the 'net
in this manner back in the day. Good times!

\- The author mentioned not being able to run EZSetup over an X11 session. As
I recall, many of the graphical system utilities SGI's proprietary framework,
which used some proprietary extensions that would not render over vanilla X11.
The only way you could run them was from another SGI (using X11 forwarding) or
from the local console. I'll bet this is why EZSetup never ran for you.

So much fun. I'm alllllmost tempted to go looking for an Indy on eBay. :)

[1] [https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19274/](https://www.exploit-
db.com/exploits/19274/)

------
puzzle
Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media
requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader.
Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?

~~~
octorian
I think the whole 512 byte sector CD-ROM thing was common to all the 90's-era
"Real UNIX" machines. They generally all wanted to treat CDs like a hard
drive, for booting purposes. (PCs, on the other hand, did a different weird
hack where they'd embed a floppy image at the state of the CD and the BIOS
knew how to handle that.)

~~~
puzzle
Yeah, you're right, they wanted 512 instead of 2048 bytes per sector to use
the CD as a HD. But I think that at least one of the Unix vendors shipped the
install media as 520 byte sectors, with 512 bytes of data and 8 bytes of
checksum. In order to duplicate the discs, you needed to own a writer that was
fancier than average (i.e. a SCSI unit, not an IDE one).

~~~
__d
I keep a DEC RRD-40 drive (with its weird pre-caddy disc holder thing) around
for the purpose of booting old DECstations. Not sure if it used 520B sectors
though. I _think_ I have the manual .. somewhere.

------
cup-of-tea
While interesting, a yak shave is where you go off on a long excursion to
solve a problem that helps you solve the _real_ problem. This, on the other
hand, is just having a hobby. Calling it yak shaving doesn't seem appropriate.

~~~
octorian
The long excursion might be seen as implementing all that code to do EFS-to-
TAR. (Rather than figure out how to compile a Linux kernel module, or run an
old version of Linux on something.)

If I was trying to do this project, I'd just do what it took to get an EFS-
supporting OS up and running, expose via NFS, and be done with it.

