Quoting James Robinson <jmrobinson3@verizon.net>:

> Hello,
> I just got my hands on 6 IRIS Indigo's and and Octane, The Indigo's are
> 2 R3000, 3 R4000 and one R4400.
> What  can I do with NetBSD on these boxes?

The Octane won't run NetBSD, but the Indigos can. However, there is a  
gotcha with the R4000 Revision 2.2 chips. They have some bugs that we  
do not work around and you'll experience significant instability in  
user mode. The R4400 chips aren't similarly broken, so far as I  
recall. 'hinv' (perhaps with additional flags) should tell you what  
revision you have, as will NetBSD when it boots.

The R3000's don't have a bootloader, but you could just make a large  
enough sgivol partition and squeeze a kernel into it. They seem to run  
well, or did at least the last time I tried, but you'll probably need  
to use the serial console.

The only framebuffer supported on Indigo machines is the GR2 series.  
Otherwise you'll have to live with the rather limited prom terminal,  
or better, use a serial console.

So, what can you do with it? Well, nothing in the realm of 3D  
graphics, but an Indigo would probably make a decent, albeit slow,  
server of some sort.

> Does NetBSD support clustering?

There's nothing in the base system for this, so far as I'm aware, but  
I imagine there are user-level clustering solutions that would work.  
These machines aren't all that fast, so I don't see it as being worth  
while.

> I have an IBM NetVista running Fedora R5 to boot off of, but don't have
> a clue on how to get the boxes to boot let alone mount a NFS file
> systems.

See http://www.NetBSD.org/Ports/sgimips

The FAQ isn't terribly long, but it still contains a fair bit of  
useful information that should help you get started.

> I have seen from the archive that I have to play with the OSLoader and
> other var's, but there doesn't seem to be a good uHowTo on putting it
> all to in one spot.

Yes, once you have a system installed and the 'aoutboot' program in  
the sgivol partition, you'll need to specify the OSLoader so that the  
prom executes 'aoutboot' to start the system.

Good luck,
Steve

> Thanks,
> James Robinson