The SGI Challenge S is a server version of the famous SGI Indy, missing all the video and audio hardware of the Indy but with additional SCSI ports and expansion slots. It comes in a nice blue case. Other than that, the two are essentially identical. It was launched in 1996 as a way for SGI to compete in the growing internet server market, which up until that point was dominated by players like Sun and Compaq.
My Challenge S was a lucky find on eBay. The seller didn't know how to test it, so it was sold as "for parts"- luckily, eveverything except the disk drives worked on arrival. It has the Sony power supply, which is proportedly more reliable than the Nidec variant used in other Indy/Challenge S systems. There's also a Set Engineering 100Mbit ethernet card installed, a rare find and the fastest network card available for these systems' GIO bus.
Since the machine was working on arrival, there was relatively little to do getting it ready for more serious use. I gave the case plastics a good clean with Windex, blew off the inside with compressed air, and scrubbed some dirty and rusty spots on the PCBs with isopropyl alcohol. Although the machine worked, the disks inside seemed dead so I ordered a ZuluSCSI disk emulator. When that arrived, I set it up with two 4GB virtual disks for root and storage volumes and the CD images for installing Irix 6.5.22.
The installation was... eventful. It was my first time installing Irix and even following some of the excellent guides available on the 'net, I still made some mistakes in installing software the first time around. I couldn't figure out the inst dependency hell I got myself into, so I restarted the installation procedure on a fresh virtual disk. When I finally got Irix installed, I followed the hardening guide available here to remove some of the 90s-era default accounts and set up password encryption - which wasn't the default back then!
After installing, I started messing around with networking the machine. It turns out that trying to use the GIO-bus card as your primary network interface is pretty tricky; you can only seemingly assign both network devices to the same IP address and accept that the built-in interface doesn't work. If anyone knows how to do this better, please contact me and share the knowledge :) Here are my networking configs for this machine:
# TODO
Once I had internet access, I started installing modern software from SGUG-RSE. This project introduces a RPM-based package manager that packages lots of open-source software for Irix. Members of SGUG have even gotten LLVM and the latest versions of GCC working on Irix! This awesome effort is something that anybody with a SGI machine can take advantage of and I can't say enough good things about the people behind it or the porting efforts themselves. Anyway, I configured the repo for updates online and set about installing some new software. With bash, git, screen, GCC, LLVM, and some scripting languages installed, I felt a bit more at home and started setting up my dotfiles for Irix.
The machine is incredibly quiet with the disk emulator, to the point where I forget that it's on when I'm right next to it. With the fast ethernet adapter, it's a great headless server for Vintage Unix things, like serving content to other machines via old versions of NFS. I have a soft spot for this machine as the first SGI in my collection and it gets a prized place amongst the other pieces of silicon :)