Some pitfalls when setting up a SGI/MIPS machine

When I set up a SGI/Irix Octane 2 (with 2 MIPS R12k CPUs) the last time, I ran into two pitfalls I want to mention here:

1) On newer machines (which does not use the old-fashioned R10k-CPUs anymore, I assume) you cannot install any IRIX 6.5 version you want. On my machine, it had to be at least 6.5.10, otherwise the starting of the miniroot (Installation Tools) failed (machine hang up completely)
Although IRIX releasenote contains some information about some hardware support, I found nothing about R12k or Octane2 there :-(

2) NFS installation failed with following error:
ERROR: this software distribution is not meant to install on the version of IRIX currently running on this machine. Sorry
This happend for me when I tried to install form the ONC/NFS CD that comes with IRIX 6.5. The reason of this problem is that this CD is also suited for the use of IRIX 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4, not only 6.5, which means that the distribution is not located in /CDROM/dist (as usual), but in /CDROM/dist6.5
Changing the path in the instalaltion tools to the right distribution directory solves the problem!