Some people have reported that IRIX 5.1 isn't very reliable and that it
is worth it to run 5.2.   5.3 is even better, but it is still not
perfect.  (In other words: IT WORKS FINE AS Install.ms DESCRIBES!)

Robert Keller <rck@fangio.asd.sgi.com> has some tips for filesystem
layout:

NOTE: For efs filesystems, you want to be sure that you mount your
news spool using the lbsize option (/etc/fstab) set to 4096, eg:
          
    /dev/dsk/dks1d5s7 /spool efs rw,raw=/dev/rdsk/dks1d5s7,lbsize=4096 0 0

This tells efs to only preallocate 4K worth of space on the first write 
of a file to disk.  The default of 32K causes a terrible waste of effort 
for the writing of an average 2K news posting.  This also can Innd
slow down quite a bit, as the efs is searching for spare 32kB blocks on
disk. If you can use xfs then do so.

For the new xfs filesystems, you want to be increase the default filesystem 
block size from 512 bytes to about 2K for maximum performance.  I just setup 
a 8 Gig xfs news spool on a Challenge L using 2K blocks and the performance 
is absolutely incredible.

See also <http://reality.sgi.com/rck/software/inn.html> for more tips
on running INN on SGI platforms.

Another note to the 5.3XFS: (From: olson@anchor.engr.sgi.com (Dave Olson))
   The ordering/location of files in a directory can change when
   files are unlinked, with xfs, and some of fastrm's assumptions
   therefore break. 
So if you get files which are to be expired with fastrm, but which
stay in spool, then try to use normal expire or edit expirerm to
remove -s option from RMPROC:
   old: RMPROC="fastrm -e -s ${SPOOL}" 
   new: RMPROC="fastrm -e -u ${SPOOL}"
6.2XFS has been changed to respect the traditional readdir()
behaviour (after rck@fangio.asd.sgi.com (Robert Keller)).

Jack Bryans <jbryans@csulb.edu> writes:

Both ACT_STYLE and DBZCFLAGS may use MMAP.  If you use either, you'll
need the following patch:
*** include/clibrary.h.orig     Thu Mar 18 13:04:07 1993
--- include/clibrary.h  Sat Mar  9 14:13:40 1996
***************
*** 103,109 ****
--- 103,111 ----
  extern POINTER                malloc();
  extern POINTER                realloc();
  #if   defined(ACT_MMAP)
+ #ifndef __sgi
  extern char           *mmap();
+ #endif /* not sgi */
  #endif        /* defined(ACT_MMAP) */

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.