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What Can I Do w/ an SGI Challenge XL and No Money?
Adam Turman asks: "The school where I do tech work in the summers just received a 4-processor SGI Challenge XL Irix machine. As it is a public magnet school serving eight of the poorest counties in Virginia, we have very little money to pay someone to support the machine, and none of us who work here know any Unix past 'cd' and 'ls'. As far as I know, we would not receive any money from the sale of the machine. So, I have to ask: What is this computer best suited doing? Would it be better to hire someone who knows IRIX or learn it ourselves? How much would we need to pay a good systems administrator? Forgive my ignorance of UNIX and related subjects, but I feel that Slashdot is the best place to get ideas for what to do with this system." Any admins nearby looking to donate some time to a worthy cause?
Do what my public school did when they got their Unix server: firewall the whole subnet into a proxy server so they can censor what web pages you access! Yay!
Oh, and consulting any one of the Learning UNIX books out there ain't too bad either. O'Reilly is always a good choice. "Unix for Dummies" is informative and pretty funny too.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
You might be able to find a volunteer to help you learn the basics of the system. This could very easily get the ball rolling and you will soon be able to teach yourself.
I recieved a little SGI Indy from a friend of mine (he got two indys and an indigo that his office wasn't going to use anymore!) and i actually learned the bulk of my unix-like knowledge from that. command lines, where to find configurations for certain things... etc.
Irix is a pretty neat OS really - I've been impressed with the interface it uses. There are all kinds of neat audio and video and 3d tools for irix, many of them you might be able to find for free-ish.
I'd think you would be able to teach some good unix skills, in addition to maybe some interesting application skills. All in all, if it works and stays working (i haven't had a problem with my indy except when i filled up the drive, oops) you could get some great experience for you and your students.
--onyx--
I love SGI, personally, but unfortunately this is (as others have said) a compute powerhouse that lacks the wonderful graphics features for which SGI is so famous.
I fear the electrical demand might put a serious dent in your school's budget, and in that case you might be wise to trade it for something else (perhaps an Indigo2 or two, or some O2s or Indys if you'd like to stick with SGI).
D
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No, CBT hasn't updated anything in the last few years. My own opinion of them is pretty low for professional use, you'll notice I didn't say they were good. But for basic introduction some people tend to find it useful. What I liked about it was that we could hand out the CDs to incoming people with absolutely no unix experience, and keep them busy for a few days. At the end of it we would ask them if they would like to continue with CBT or jump into the job with O'reilly Nutshell books. Guess which they all chose?
I've seen demos of a few other learning systems, which seemed better for taking students through some basic tasks. But none of them are a substitute for an instructor and hands-on learning.
The problem here is that the school district doesn't have any expertise to draw on, so they have to start somewhere. Maybe there are some good tutorials on the web, but I haven't seen them. But a machine like that is a godsend to poor schools, it just has to be made accessible to the students and somehow they need to be shown all the wonderful things it can do besides just web browsing.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
There currently is a good job market for these kind of skills.
Why not let your computer class use the box, they could set it up and learn the basics of UNIX. This year in my high school class a couple other students and myself were able to "borrow" a couple of boxes to put Linux on and setup a free web site hosting service for the students at the school (as well as message boards, chat, streaming radio and live camera images from the school). The result was CHSS Realm (sorry the school's network seems to be down today, hopefully it'll be back up in a day or two!). I'm sure at least a handfull of the students would like to learn to use that computer you have! It's not like they can wreck it or anything, if all else fails just reinstall everything!
As for what to do with the server, that depends on what the students are like. If you have high school students, and this magnet school is tech-tilted, you can use the computer to teach graphics (3D even?), programing (something other than BASIC), or networking. It really depends on what skills the available teachers have.
And available teachers can be volunteers. Try a LUG or IrixUG (if such a beast exists) in the eight counties the school serves, you may be able to find a few people willing to come teach computing to a few dozen skulls full of mush. (Push the benefits of teaching: re-learn the subject, watch fire being ignited in a few eyes, looks great on resume when you volunteer.)
If it is a high school, try the local Community College for teachers. Some of the teachers/tech staff there might want to help, and a few students might be skilled enough in what you want to teach. Heck, try universities nearby. Many campus clubs do outreach, including teaching/tutoring youngsters. I know of two or three like that at my university, so you might get lucky.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Well, at least anyone attempting could rest assured that the interface's most cherished features, especially the Blue Screen Of Death, will remain substantially the same no matter what the processor.
Ugh. I don't think I knew there was MIPS support in NT, but I'm wondering now:
If I killed someone for doing something as stupid as installing NT 4 onto a Silicon Graphics machine, would I be eligible for the electric chair, or would the idiot who incited his own death in this way be eligible for a Darwin Award?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I'm not sure whether to laugh hysterically or cry at the thought of someone trying to install 2000 on a SGI box.
Hmmm... Yeah. How well does Windows 2000 support non-Alpha/non-x86 multiprocessor systems?
LOL
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Hmm... Well, it would never run on the SG Challenge XL, then, since, AFAIK, that's a MIPS10000 machine.
Yeah, now why *anyone* would want to run NT on an Indy is beyond me. Seems to me that it defeats almost half the purpose of having an Indy.
PowerPC is even more laughable: Mac users are undoubtedly the biggest PowerPC users, and they're incredibly independant and scornful of Microsloth.
Latex and Emacs seem to be flakey on NT.Flakey? I can't even get vi to start up in DOS!
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
rm -rf
You know, I would agree with the moderation that this was really funny, if it wasn't possible that a new user might mistake this for being a serious instruction.
I think we're all united in that we want to get people away from using Windows as a desktop operating system, let alone a serious networking operating system.
When you undermine the attempts of new Linux/UNIX users to be able to understand their systems, let alone "help" them along by making them inadvertantly erase their hard drives, all you end up doing is making them abandon their efforts in frustration and turn to such wonderfully stable, efficient, inexpensive and highly secure operating systems as Windows 2000.
Hope the guy can reinstall his operating system.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I agree, worst case is let the kids who want to figgure it out. However there are two gottchas to this approach: Make sure that you have the ability to wipe the entire system clean should you want to use it. You never know what the kids leave behind (perhaps on accident), and it is best to start from a clean slate once in a while.
Second, make sure that the kids can use this to harm other machines. Most kids are good, but there are bad apples in every bunch, so protect yourself from them.
Lots of useful things to do with this machine, so don't let it go to waste.
Get some computer based training courses about unix for your students. CBT Systems has a few from intro level to advanced admin functions. There must be at least a dozen companies with some sort of Computer Based Learning systems out there. Search the web for a few.
Find the students who would like to learn unix as an extra-curricular activity, and assign some lessons to them. Lessons should include:
- installing the operating system from scratch
- installing security patches on the OS
- basic system admin functions (adduser, backups,... )
- configuring email
- installing a web server
- basic network admin functions
- find, install, and configure a public domain 3D rendering software package for SGI
- make the rendering software usable by several simultaneous users
- assign some students to render some 3D objects
- assign some advanced students to create a small animation clip using freely available SGI software
and turn them loose. Make them write reports on what they have done for each lesson (so you can pass their reports to others to learn from).
After the first semester or so, there will be a hard-core group who will love the system. Use them to administrate the system. Others who only want to point and click on web browsers will not find it interesting, leave them to their macs and windoze machines.
Make sure you impress upon the core group they are responsible for keeping the system in a functioning state, usable by other students at any time (except for pre-announced down times, just like in a real company), and it must conform to your school districts policy (no launching DDoS, no fake e-mail, no warez). When they become responsible for keeping the system clean, they tend to become extremely good at keeping the black hats off the system.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on