The End of an IRIS
Last updated: Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:01:00 GMT
Spare a tear for quality kit.
I'm in my office again. Usually, this forgotten little room is cold, and the silence is broken only by the faint mosquito whine of the pair of IDE drives in my PC and the movement of the air it has to shunt around to keep itself cool. But at the moment it's quite warm, and I'm quite deafened. I've brought some old kit in from the garage, in from the dry chill -- though it'd be a lot colder if it weren't for that 42U rack humming away in the corner.
On my walnut bureau I have stacked four external SCSI disc housings, including a Sun StorEdge, totalling 10 discs. In addition to this, I have a Sun Ultra 1 Enterprise and my faithful old Silicon Graphics Indy Challenge S. They make quite a racket, all together.
IRIX 5.3 was my introduction to Unix system administration. I'd been a Unix user while studying at University -- mostly AIX and IRIX, with a smattering of SunOS -- but had an Acorn RiscPC 600 at home. Until I heard that SGI were shifting old stock, and doing a favourable deal on old Indigos. I sold up my RPC600 and put my name on the list. I never looked back.
IRIX, even back in the days of 5.3, was a good introduction to system administration. Sure, it had its faults -- it was hideously insecure out of the box, for a start, and often SGI had its own ways of doing things that kind of got in the way. The lack of free compiler made things painful, unless you knew someone with the right CDs. But, by and large, it was robust, useable and very well documented. It did a lot of things right: 4Dwm, xwsh, swmgr and chkconfig to name but a few. We learned a lot. Sun's package management still isn't anywhere near as good.
In the decade since then, I've always owned an SGI, and I've always had an IRIX box running. Indeed, my Challenge S is the only box that's never failed me; not once has it suffered a hardware failure, and I can't remember the last time I had to reboot it for anything other than a kernel upgrade. I remember, when I emigrated, that nothing brought the realisation home as much as shutting down my SGIs. I was leaving.
I was back in a week.
My sojourn overseas didn't last, but it says something that in the few days I was there I got myself a cable-modem, authored my own TIMEZONE file and brought the Challenge S online in foreign climes. What it probably says is "geek."
Support has now dwindled to the point that my one remaining SGI really is a relic, a museum piece. It's a shame but it's true. SGI aren't supporting the hardware platform any more, and support in the free software community has reached a new low. IRIX' salad days have passed.
As I sit here dd'ing /dev/random into the free corners of all of these drives I can't help but feel sad. It's a shame that these things have become useless. In a way they're taking me with them. The skills I gained don't seem entirely useful now. Like the technology I used to gain them, they're obsolete, replaced by a proliferation of free and not so free x86 operating systems, of varying quality, running on cheap hardware, of equally varying quality.
And the young turks I work with don't seem to lack anything from having missed out on this old school experience. Far from it -- they're au fait with things I've yet to learn, because I'm not bothering to unlearn what still seems to work. They ask me questions and then wonder at my answers, and it seems like what it always boils down to is "that's the way it was done, when I was a lad."
I'd cite the pressures of family life and home renovation on my time, but the fact is that what time I spend doing those things, they spend on getting drunk and trying to get laid. Like I did when I was them.
I'm 25, and already retiring. How useless will I be at 26? Maybe I should take up duck farming now, beat the rush.