Gateway computers sold a rebranded Qube2 for a while. The company I
worked for at the time (1999 - 2007) got a Gateway Qube2 for free. We
had no use for it, so my boss said take it home and play with it.
Because of that, I later bought two Cobalt RAQs for our elearning
hosting. Later still I deployed a few BlueOnyx servers for some
customers in my own consulting business.
---
Drew.
On 12/15/2020 3:25 am, ^Gecko^ wrote:
I remember Symantec had the 'Velociraptor" firewall appliance, which
was a raq of some sort, except the front bezel was yellow instead
of......cobalt blue.
I don't know if that was some kind of licensing deal or what.
On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 6:39 PM Rickard Osser
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Yeah, walking down memory lane...
I got a Qube 2700 from a little know company named Cobalt Microserver.
No 88 when I checked the s/n...
Anyway I saw this small notice in Linux Journal I guess:
-
Can you guess what DaveM is doing now?
Yeah, porting Linux to MIPS at Cobalt Microserver..
-
DaveM ported Linux to Sparc and by using that I knew about him. I also
hajj opened to get the exact same idea for an integrated Soho server
with a Web-gui about 2 weeks before I saw the notice. I stopped
developing and called the company from Sweden instead, getting a
distribution deal and my first Qube.
Anyway, many Qubes, RaQs and years later I'm still here.
When they closed the Cobalt office in Amsterdam, they sent the rest of
the old stuff and repair kits to me in Stockholm.
I made an WiFi AP of the qube2, and numerous SSL packages for qubes and
raqs, until they could implement it as standard with the raq3/4...
All in all I think we sold around 600 Cobalts from 1999-2002 in Sweden
not selling more than 5 to any one customer. No big hosting partners
and only through the channel, resellers. But a lot of custom machines.
Extra disks, raids, larger disks, more memory and custom packages. It
was fun... :-)
And very stylish! :-)
BTW, In one conference about 2001 I saw a sales/support presentation
where they broke down sales figures and support calls to every country
in EMEA. I had sold 99% of all servers in Sweden in 2000, a few hundred
and there was only 1 support call from Sweden, not from me though... I
actually got a glass-plaque at the diner. Well, my partner in Denmark
also got one, for other reasons.
Ahh... Memories. :-)
Sorry for taking up your time.
Best regards,
Rickard
Michael Stauber <[email protected]> skrev: (15 december 2020
00:43:17 CET)
Hi Chris,
We have kept a collection of stuff over the years, and finally decided
to start unboxing all the old stuff and put it on display. Customers
enjoy seeing it.
I can imagine.
I was never aware of the Cobalt Control Station when it was out, though
maybe we never operated the machines at a scale that it would have made
sense. Seems like a really cool gadget, though and especially if
you're managing a bunch of them.
Yeah, the ControlStation was kinda nice. It had a custom tailored
RaQ550
GUI that had the Vsite hosting bits stripped and instead the management
features added. It basically ran a NewLinQ server from which you could
distribute PKGs. And on top of that some monitoring stuff with which
you
could check the state of attached RaQs and Qubes and send alerts on
service failures.
Back in the days I poked through the innards of the ControlStation and
found a couple of hair raising security flaws. I don't recall much of
the details, but once I had reported them they (mostly) got fixed.
Still: The ControlStation was of course a low hanging fruit for
exploitation - considering that it could do remote patching and even
remote code execution on all attached devices.
In some parts the CS looked like it had been rushed out of the door and
lacked some of the ingenuity and security mindedness that the rest of
the stuff had.
As for the Qubes, would you believe I've never laid hands on one?
That surprises me. I'd have guessed you at least had one on your desk
as
toy back in the days. :p
I had a Qube3 and Qube4, but I didn't do much with them aside from
rolling up packages and playing around a little.
Sometimes I wonder if in an alternate universe would Cobalt have
retooled their product lineup to fit the times and been a player in the
space of, say, Synology/Qnap, hybrid cloud, and maybe even some
crossover with Ubiquiti. I suppose if that had happened, we wouldn't
have anything like BlueOnyx today. We'd have... something else.
Yeah, that would have been interesting, indeed. OTOH: Once they had
sold
out to Sun whatever creative potential the remainder of the staff had:
It wouldn't and couldn't fit into Sun's corporate architecture and had
no chance to thrive there. Imagine a big bank buying up a tiny
e-payment
provider. They get assigned a small broom closet in the basement and
eventually someone forgets they're still there and accidentally turns
off the lights for good.
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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