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<p>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. </p>
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<div class="pre" style="margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family: monospace">Drew.</div>
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<p id="reply-intro">On 12/15/2020 3:25 am, ^Gecko^ wrote:</p>
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<div>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.</div>
<div>I don't know if that was some kind of licensing deal or what.</div>
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<div class="v1gmail_attr" dir="ltr">On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 6:39 PM Rickard Osser <<a href="mailto:rickard.osser@bluapp.com" rel="noreferrer">rickard.osser@bluapp.com</a>> wrote:</div>
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<div>Hi,<br /><br />Yeah, walking down memory lane... <br /><br />I got a Qube 2700 from a little know company named Cobalt Microserver. No 88 when I checked the s/n...<br /><br />Anyway I saw this small notice in Linux Journal I guess:<br />-<br />Can you guess what DaveM is doing now?<br /><br />Yeah, porting Linux to MIPS at Cobalt Microserver..<br />-<br />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.<br /><br />Anyway, many Qubes, RaQs and years later I'm still here. <br /><br />When they closed the Cobalt office in Amsterdam, they sent the rest of the old stuff and repair kits to me in Stockholm. <br /><br />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...<br /><br />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... :-) <br /><br />And very stylish! :-) <br /><br />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.<br /><br />Ahh... Memories. :-) <br /><br /><br />Sorry for taking up your time.<br /><br />Best regards,<br />Rickard<br /><br />
<div class="v1gmail_quote">Michael Stauber <<a href="mailto:mstauber@blueonyx.it" rel="noreferrer">mstauber@blueonyx.it</a>> skrev: (15 december 2020 00:43:17 CET)
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<pre>Hi Chris,<br /><br /></pre>
<blockquote class="v1gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">We have kept a collection of stuff over the years, and finally decided<br />to start unboxing all the old stuff and put it on display. Customers<br />enjoy seeing it.</blockquote>
<pre><br />I can imagine.<br /><br /></pre>
<blockquote class="v1gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">I was never aware of the Cobalt Control Station when it was out, though<br />maybe we never operated the machines at a scale that it would have made<br />sense. Seems like a really cool gadget, though and especially if<br />you're managing a bunch of them.</blockquote>
<pre><br />Yeah, the ControlStation was kinda nice. It had a custom tailored RaQ550<br />GUI that had the Vsite hosting bits stripped and instead the management<br />features added. It basically ran a NewLinQ server from which you could<br />distribute PKGs. And on top of that some monitoring stuff with which you<br />could check the state of attached RaQs and Qubes and send alerts on<br />service failures.<br /><br />Back in the days I poked through the innards of the ControlStation and<br />found a couple of hair raising security flaws. I don't recall much of<br />the details, but once I had reported them they (mostly) got fixed.<br />Still: The ControlStation was of course a low hanging fruit for<br />exploitation - considering that it could do remote patching and even<br />remote code execution on all attached devices.<br /><br />In some parts the CS looked like it had been rushed out of the door and<br />lacked some of the ingenuity and security mindedness that the rest of<br />the stuff had.<br /><br /></pre>
<blockquote class="v1gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">As for the Qubes, would you believe I've never laid hands on one?</blockquote>
<pre><br />That surprises me. I'd have guessed you at least had one on your desk as<br />toy back in the days. :p<br /><br />I had a Qube3 and Qube4, but I didn't do much with them aside from<br />rolling up packages and playing around a little.<br /><br /></pre>
<blockquote class="v1gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;">Sometimes I wonder if in an alternate universe would Cobalt have<br />retooled their product lineup to fit the times and been a player in the<br />space of, say, Synology/Qnap, hybrid cloud, and maybe even some<br />crossover with Ubiquiti. I suppose if that had happened, we wouldn't<br />have anything like BlueOnyx today. We'd have... something else.</blockquote>
<pre><br />Yeah, that would have been interesting, indeed. OTOH: Once they had sold<br />out to Sun whatever creative potential the remainder of the staff had:<br />It wouldn't and couldn't fit into Sun's corporate architecture and had<br />no chance to thrive there. Imagine a big bank buying up a tiny e-payment<br />provider. They get assigned a small broom closet in the basement and<br />eventually someone forgets they're still there and accidentally turns<br />off the lights for good.</pre>
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<br />-- <br />Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</div>
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