Nick--

First of all, thanks for responding!

Do you know any way to make the Origin 200 operate more quietly?  I'm a
hardware geek, so I know that there are cooling issues and air-flow issues,
but the darned thing is so loud that I can't just keep it running all the
time.  If I keep it on, it's distracting, even when I put it in another room
with the door closed.  (My hearing is pretty sensitive...)

It's in an air-conditioned house, and I don't mind putting in some
temperature sensors to shut it off when it gets too warm inside...  I'd hate
to go to the trouble of creating a noise-muffling cabinet if there's some
known way of making the beast a bit quieter.  (Since I don't beat the disk
drives up, they shouldn't generate much heat.  I wouldn't mind pulling out
all the drives but one, if that would help...)

Since I have a couple of 'em (as well as another couple of loud rack-mount
boxes), I've even considered building a custom cabinet with a single
large-capacity fan in it to draw air through all four boxes, and mount a
dozen LM34-based temperature sensors at strategic points in the boxes to shut
'em all down if it gets too warm in the cabinet...

--marco

nick@snowman.net wrote:

They are running at reduced speed unless the temp is over ~90.  I can
answer most common questions about them.
        Nick

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Marco C. Mason wrote:

quoted

Hello, OSS @ SGI gang--

I need a little help, please!  As a result of a company closing, I've
received a pair of SGI Origin 200 servers.  Unfortunately, since the
support contract on them has expired, I can't seem to use any of the
support services at www.sgi.com.

I'm just a home experimenter who wants to run the things 'til they die.
I'm very pleased with the performance, software, etc., and I'm very
familiar with them (as I worked on them 8 hrs / day for a year and a
half until the office closed).

The only difficulty is that these things are LOUD!  I'd like to find out
if there are any temperature monitors inside the thing, and if I can run
the fans at a reduced speed, or remove some of the fans to make them
reasonable in a home environment.  They don't do a lot (as I just do
some CPU-intensive stuff on them every once in a while, and very little
disk-I/O).

Thus, I'd like to find a contact for simple (but technical) hardware
questions like these on the Origin 200.  If you guys could send me a
friendly contact or two, I'd be very grateful.

(I'm also interested in making the thing dual-boot Irix & Linux, if the
Linux port is close to operating...  I've also got a pair of Indys that
I'm planning on sacrificing to the Linux gods...)

Thanks in advance--

--marco