Thanks to Matthew R. Wilson for the help getting my SGI Indy up and running! In place of the original Seagate 1GB SCSI hard drive I used a SCSI2SD, which is a SCSI drive simulator that uses an SDCard for storage. Much more reliable than a 20 year old hard drive.

Installing Irix 5.3 is pretty straightforward as it is a single CD, but getting Irix 6.5.22 takes a bit more work since it is 5 CDs. Matthew figured out how to get the bootp loader to work correctly, as we were able to get an install of all 5 CDs over the network (10Mbit btw) from his NUC.

Once the install was complete, but not configured, I made a dd image of the SDCard. That makes it easy to start over with a clean config if I need to.

Matthew also had some spare memory, so we bumped it up to 128MBs. Combine that with a screaming 133MHz MIPS R4600 and we are talking power! 300,000 Dhrystones.

I would not, however, put this guy directly on the internet. 2003 security patches does not bode well.