I recall reading years ago in NeXTWORLD that some folks were running their cubes with BOTH their original '030 motherboard and an '040 upgrade motherboard they got from NeXT at the same time.
As I recall most people didn't do this because NeXT required you to RMA the '030 board to get the '040 upgrade.
Has anyone here tried this or knows about this?
Seems like it should just work but there may be more to it than I realize.
Thanks.
Quote from: "ErikTheHack"I recall reading years ago in NeXTWORLD that some folks were running their cubes with BOTH their original '030 motherboard and an '040 upgrade motherboard they got from NeXT at the same time.
you are refering to the FAQ point 5.40?
http://www.uni-giessen.de/faq/archiv/next-faq/msg00000.htmlSince its like two independed computers in one case it makes no sense.
I think basically other than just wiring it up via eithernet you have to do some kind of hack to the backplane, you also have to remove the NBIC as you can only have 1 in the cube, of course not many 030's would have it in anycase.
FYI, you can't use two 040's in the same cube, just an 030 plus an 040 will work for this trick.
Yeah! That's it. Thanks guys. That's pretty much what I was looking for. I guess I could have googled that ;)
The main reason I asked I guess was to see if anyone here had done this.
I guess it's just me that thinks it'd be pretty cool to run both out of one box. BTW, it would seem that you could use any manner of media to boot -- in 5.40 he just decided to set up a net boot scenario. Seems quite sensible.
As someone who only has slabs, I'm curious what the benefits are to this? Is it sheerly the NeXT-geek gloriness of running two systems in one houseing (which is pretty wicked cool) or is there a secondary benefit that I'm missing? Do you set up keyboards, mice and monitors for both? Can you share internal drives? External drivers? Is it possible or worth setting up Zilla on this hybrid for any apps?
I find this most interesting and would love to hear what people have done (assuming there's someone here who's completed this proceedure). Thanks for indulging me.
iirc you netboot the 030 off the 040, not sure exactly what you can do with it other than use zilla.app, be cool if you could VNC into it but afaik there aint a VNC server for NEXTSTEP.
I guess the only real point was to avoid scrapping the 030 board, I wonder if Mathmatica or any other apps where able to use it, what about Renderman? or NEXTTIME?
Quote from: "brams"FYI, you can't use two 040's in the same cube, just an 030 plus an 040 will work for this trick.
Are you sure about that? Seems more likely that nobody could afford to obtain two '040 boards back in the day.
You have to physically disconnect the NBIC from the bus on all boards but one, so they're not talking to each other over the bus. There is no reason to put multiples boards in one cube unless you obtain a board without a cube case, or perhaps burn your cube case in some chemistry experiment. :-)
Thus, people were obtaining '030 boards from folks who upgraded to '040 boards. I don't think anyone purchased two '040 upgrades and tried to put them both in.
If I'm wrong, then explain what it is about the '040 board that survives the modification to disconnect the NBIC from the bus.
Quote from: "brams"I think basically other than just wiring it up via eithernet you have to do some kind of hack to the backplane, you also have to remove the NBIC as you can only have 1 in the cube, of course not many 030's would have it in anycase.
Technically, I believe that every board must have an NBIC. The real problem is that you can only have one "master" ... and every motherboard wants to be a master. All the NeXTdimension and QuintDSP boards had NBICs, or at least that's why I imagine that NeXT published documentation on the NBIC: so people could make peripherals.
NOTE: Some hacks modified the backplane, some modified the motherboard. Either way, only one motherboard was connected to the backplane.
That makes this a rather silly mod, since you end up with two networked machines that might as well each have their own box.
Quote from: "brams"iirc you netboot the 030 off the 040, not sure exactly what you can do with it other than use zilla.app, be cool if you could VNC into it but afaik there aint a VNC server for NEXTSTEP.
Ah, but NEXTSTEP has NXHost'ing, which is much better - and faster - than VNC.
Both of my color NeXT monitors are sick, and I don't really like using the mono monitors, so I am accessing my NeXTs via NXHost to a Window Server running on Mac OS X Server 1.2v3 with a Cinema Display. Pretty much the same way an '030 without a monitor would be used.
In fact, one company sold multi-motherboard software that ran the Workspace with a few "defaults" hacks to shift the dock and NXHost to the other motherboard. These guys would modify the motherboard, install their software, and deliver a box with two systems running on the same screen. I don't think they ever documented all of the defaults settings they used, or whether they had to resort to hacks more serious than setting an undocumented default. I believe the NXHost'ing is not too difficult to do, but I have never been able to make Workspace do it.
Quote from: "brams"I guess the only real point was to avoid scrapping the 030 board, I wonder if Mathmatica or any other apps where able to use it, what about Renderman? or NEXTTIME?
The developer tools would use other computers on the network to help compile.
Quote from: "Sound Consulting"Quote from: "brams"FYI, you can't use two 040's in the same cube, just an 030 plus an 040 will work for this trick.
Are you sure about that? Seems more likely that nobody could afford to obtain two '040 boards back in the day.
You have to physically disconnect the NBIC from the bus on all boards but one, so they're not talking to each other over the bus. There is no reason to put multiples boards in one cube unless you obtain a board without a cube case, or perhaps burn your cube case in some chemistry experiment. :-)
Thus, people were obtaining '030 boards from folks who upgraded to '040 boards. I don't think anyone purchased two '040 upgrades and tried to put them both in.
If I'm wrong, then explain what it is about the '040 board that survives the modification to disconnect the NBIC from the bus.
I've not tried it to be honest, I have no 030, I have a turbo in my cube though I also have a 25mhz board, I was going to give it a whirl so I went a mooching round comp.sys.next. According to Mike Paquette all 040 roms are programmed to probe for the presence of the NBIC at boot time, if it don't find an NBIC it b0rks during boot.
Consdering that both of my boards appear to have soldered NBICS I am therefore no going to attempt to unsolder one in the effort of proving or disproving what Mike said, for me at least running two boards would be pointless, cool no doubt but never the less pointless. Randy Rencsock was going to try the idea as he had a board with a socketed NBIC, he never posted what the result was.
So as you correctly pointed out, two masters won't work only one of them could/should be master, maybe it would be possible to hack something on the backplane too disconnect the NBIC thus fooling the 040 into the fact that it's connected when in fact it's not, if somebody figures out how to do it though, I'd be interested in playing.
Quote from: "Sound Consulting"You have to physically disconnect the NBIC from the bus on all boards but one, so they're not talking to each other over the bus. There is no reason to put multiples boards in one cube unless you obtain a board without a cube case, or perhaps burn your cube case in some chemistry experiment. :-)
I thought that was the whole point of using an 030 board as it don't have an NBIC nor did it need one to function, unlike an 040 which needs one to boot.
NXhost sounds interesting, I didn't know about that, I'm away from my NeXT stuff ATM, does it tell you how to uses NXhost in the system admin book?
The whole point of using an 030 board, obviously (for me at least) whould be to use an 030 board instead of not using it (just leaving in a box or even throwing it)
Cheers
Quote from: "brams"According to Mike Paquette all 040 roms are programmed to probe for the presence of the NBIC at boot time, if it don't find an NBIC it b0rks during boot.
Thanks for that info.
QuoteSo as you correctly pointed out, two masters won't work only one of them could/should be master, maybe it would be possible to hack something on the backplane too disconnect the NBIC thus fooling the 040 into the fact that it's connected when in fact it's not, if somebody figures out how to do it though, I'd be interested in playing.
I cannot recall who modified the backplane, but some folks were doing it. Seems like that would work for two '040 motherboards, because the one in the modified slot would not know the difference between a modified backplane and a cube with no extra cards.
I never liked the idea, though, because if you end up with three NeXTbus peripherals and want to try them out, you'd have to un-modify the backplane first. Modifying the extra motherboards seems easier to reverse, since you simply pull them out of the cube. For example, if you had three NeXTdimension boards!
QuoteI thought that was the whole point of using an 030 board as it don't have an NBIC nor did it need one to function, unlike an 040 which needs one to boot.
I assume the '030 has an NBIC, else it would not have made any sense to build a NeXTcube. The NBIC communicates with the bus and the peripherals. But perhaps it was socketed or desolderable, and not required by the boot firmware.
QuoteNXhost sounds interesting, I didn't know about that, I'm away from my NeXT stuff ATM, does it tell you how to uses NXhost in the system admin book?
Every AppKit-based application will accept "-NXHost host" as an additional command-line parameter. The AppKit directs all Display PostScript to the specified host for this application. It's like X Windows, in a way.
I've also written command-line (i.e. non-AppKit) programs which look for this parameter and send DPS to the specified host. I think I saw other command-line apps doing this and decided to support it.
In OPENSTEP, "-NXHost host" became "-NSHost host" ... and I frequently get them wrong because I have a mixed network.
It's sometimes hard to get this to happen if you launch an app from the Dock, but I believe there are "secret" defaults settings for Workspace which do this. I cannot remember whether the Dock was its own process in NEXTSTEP, or if Workspace handled everything. The company that provided dual-motherboard cubes fixed Workspace and Dock on the '030 machine so that everything you launched was NXHost'ed to the main '040.
To do this yourself, just telnet into the machine and launch a program using:
/LocalApps/Foo.app/Foo -NXHost host &
(The ampersand gives you the prompt back while the program continues running in the background)
You'll know if it fails because the program will print an error about not finding the Window Server.
At some point, a third-party created a Service-based program that would let you select an app in Workspace, then launch it on another computer. But the application had to be at the same path on each computer, otherwise it wouldn't be found. NeXT eventually shipped this with systems as AppLauncher. You could edit preferences and add each host name on your network. This makes it quite easy.
But we're off-topic for this particular forum. I wanted to document all the flavors since you asked about NXHost. Maybe I'll move this part to a new topic in an appropriate forum.
QuoteThe whole point of using an 030 board, obviously (for me at least) whould be to use an 030 board instead of not using it (just leaving in a box or even throwing it)
Yeah, I agree that is a good idea. Just modify the '030 board. The cube box will power it and protect it from poking hands. I think there are issues about internal drives ... not much room for multiple drives inside, and the internal SCSI interface needs something attached to terminate the bus. If you can figure out how to get an external SCSI working, that's probably best for power considerations.
If you're not handy with desoldering, I'm not sure what to suggest. You don't want to damage the '030 board. Maybe you're lucky and it's socketed. If not, perhaps you can find someone who will delicately desolder the NBIC and put a socket in its place so the '030 can be restored if need be.
Quote from: "Sound Consulting"I assume the '030 has an NBIC, else it would not have made any sense to build a NeXTcube. The NBIC communicates with the bus and the peripherals. But perhaps it was socketed or desolderable, and not required by the boot firmware.
Yes indeed the '030 cube did have an NBIC socket (they shipped without an NBIC and don't require one to boot) and cube owners could buy and put an NBIC chip in it as they would to use the Ariel Quint DSP etc etc, the point I'm making is that the NBIC was only required for communication across the NeXTbus. As the 030 board fitted in the same cube as an '040 board would not be required to communicate across the NeXTbus (it's not hooked up to any drives, it's netbooting) then it does not need an NBIC, indeed, having 2 NBICS causes headaches. The only thing the '030 requires from that point on is power.
The problem is that the '040 needs an NBIC to boot up, so a more involved hack would be needed to leave the NBIC in place (which in my case is obvious as it's soldered) so now that my interest has peaked how do you disable the NeXTbus interface on the 25mhz '040 board whilst leaving the NBIC in place?
Dammit!, I can see trawling of comp.sys.next is in order.
This is very interesting
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.hardware/browse_thread/thread/ff9c272350d94d66/a95d643bbdffb315?lnk=st&q=paquette+nbic+group%3Acomp.sys.next.*&rnum=1&hl=en#a95d643bbdffb315
Seems to be conflicting reports about using dual '040 boards in a cube, seems an 040 will actually work without an NBIC if and only the board is in slot 0
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.hardware/browse_thread/thread/d3fa8bdb82741288/919b6c453ccd93fa?lnk=st&q=paquette+nbic+group%3Acomp.sys.next.*&rnum=2&hl=en#919b6c453ccd93faSo if you have a socketed NBIC it might be worth a try.