[BlueOnyx:24630] Re: Old Blue Cobalts

[Drew Happli]

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 
> <rickard.osser at bluapp.com> 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 <mstauber at blueonyx.it> 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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