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</style></head><body><div>Hear, Hear!</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube</a></div><div><br></div><div>The Qube2700 was released in 1998. The Gen 1 and 2 (Qube2700/RaQ and Qube2/RaQ2)</div><div>where both MIPS based and really fun to play with.</div><div><br></div><div>I bought my first Qube2700 in November 1998 after talking with Desa Zraick (US) in September on the phone</div><div>from Sweden for about an hour. I paid for the first one using a CC. Serialnumber (#77)...</div><div>Anyway, we made an agreement that I could distribute Cobalt in Sweden (Nordic) and that </div><div>the next orders would be on a credit-line.</div><div><br></div><div>My background at the time was:</div><div>Working in the IT-business since 1986, started with Apple and Mac (yes,</div><div>Apple II techie was my first job). Anyway, after using PDP/VAX and various variants of Unix</div><div>I got into Linux in 1992. Around 1997/98 I was starting to program a Web-gui to</div><div>manage Samba/NFS/Mail/DNS/DHCP and other necessary stuff you would need in</div><div>an office appliance, I didn't get very far until I saw a small blurp on the LWN i think:</div><div><br></div><div>Do you know what David S. Miller is doing right now?</div><div><br></div><div>And then there was a short article on his porting of Linux to Mips for Cobalt and</div><div>an explanation of the Qube2700... </div><div><br></div><div>Well, I don't like to re-invent the wheel so I stopped my own development and </div><div>jumped on the Phone to talk to Desa.</div><div><br></div><div>Why did I follow Davem? He ported Linux to Sun which I was using at one of my</div><div>consulting customers. What a difference in using the archaic Solaris 1.1 (SunOS 4.1.3) and a </div><div>nice modern RH Linux port on the same hardware.</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, thanks to George and Carley Korchinsky for a very nice and fruit-full few short</div><div>years but fun. I won't forget to mention our own Taco (who worked in Holland with George and Carley)</div><div>and all the other Cobalters like Gordon Garb (Fun Apple stories) and Nicholas White (Many happy beers!)</div><div>and a lot of others.</div><div><br></div><div>For my own amusement I created some software packages for the Qube and RaQ line, SSL for use with</div><div>both the GUI and virtual-sites, Cobalts own was only virtual-sites and couldn't be sold outside of the US. The difference</div><div>to secure the GUI as well as the sites gave me quite a few customers in the US aswell.</div><div><br></div><div>I also created a WIFI-Accesspoint integrated into the Qube, the AirQube.</div><div>And then of course a host of applications running on top of Sausalito using it for management.</div><div>I created a Door-access Appliance (which could be run in HA) which I sold a few of. This version was based on Aventurine and</div><div>the payback to Michael was the first Qemu implementation and as faster more secure way of uploading ISOs.</div><div><br></div><div>Michael, did you ever get the HA-code?</div><div><br></div><div>We still host LXCs using the same base with ARX from Assa Abloy.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm still creating appliances but today most of the stuff I do is MCU (RP2040/Arduino) and Rpi.</div><div>I have made appliances based on RedHat (RHEL/CentOS/RockyLinux) as well as Suse Linux.</div><div><br></div><div>As long as Michael will be around doing BQ, I will be lurking along and put in a piece here or there...</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks Michael for all these years and to the others before, Hisao, davem, Tim Hockin and many more...</div><div><br></div><div>Your humble servant,</div><div>Rickard</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>On Fri, 2024-11-15 at 14:59 -0500, Michael Stauber via Blueonyx wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex; border-left:2px #729fcf solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>Hi Taco,<br></div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex; border-left:2px #729fcf solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>Let’s celebrate not just 25 years since the IPO, but also the vibrant <br></div><div>community and projects that continue to carry the Cobalt torch forward. <br></div><div>Here’s to the past, present, and future of Cobalt’s remarkable legacy!<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Hear hear! A toast to that! o7<br></div><div><br></div><div>Man, it's been 25 years already? Seems like yesterday.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I recall getting my first (rented) Cobalt RaQ3 in December 1996 and <br></div><div>kinda fell in love with it. I already had been dabbling with Linux for a <br></div><div>few years, so I felt right at home. And the web based GUI interface? <br></div><div>That was something else - at least for that time and age.<br></div><div><br></div><div> From a purely technical point of view I'm still in awe with some of the <br></div><div>design aspects that went into the Sausalito architecture early on, which <br></div><div>got finalized with the late Qube models and the RaQ550's.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Sure, in some parts you could see that things had been rushed a little <br></div><div>and there were the beginnings of some more advanced concepts and <br></div><div>functionality that never made it into the final products.<br></div><div><br></div><div>But the security concept and the general architecture was rock solid, <br></div><div>contained a lot of foresight and a modularity that made it easy to <br></div><div>expand on it and to keep it current.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Some parts of the code are THAT solid that they still remain in usage 25 <br></div><div>years later with next to no or miniscule changes. Some of that is still <br></div><div>in the backend of the GUI and some of that original code is still in the <br></div><div>build environment with which we build RPMs and PKGs. You just go to the <br></div><div>respective level of the code tree and run "make rpm" or "make pkg" and <br></div><div>it spits out RPMs or PKGs that are ready to be distributed.<br></div><div><br></div><div>That this still works decades later is an incredibly testimony to the <br></div><div>skills of the original designers. I raise my glass to them for a job <br></div><div>well done.<br></div><div><br></div><div> > However, as history shows, the motivations behind Sun's acquisition<br></div><div> > went beyond mere competition.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Indeed. As chance would have it I worked at the Langen office of Sun <br></div><div>Microsystems in Germany at the time leading up to and during the buy-out <br></div><div>of Cobalt. I was moonshining Solarspeed.net during the nights and by day <br></div><div>I was a support engineer for the traditional "big iron" servers of Sun.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The corporate culture of Sun Microsystems was somewhat special and the <br></div><div>weekly company wide Scott McNealy emails to all employees were a thing. <br></div><div>I do recall him frequently dissing Linux, even though one would not need <br></div><div>a perfect hindsight to predict that it eventually might become a serious <br></div><div>competition to what Sun had on offer. And it was also clear that the <br></div><div>company was not well positioned to reap any benefits in that area.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Eventually that realization must have sunk in with Scott McNealy as <br></div><div>well. Probably because of a first (abortive) move that Microsoft had <br></div><div>made in that direction, too. So out of the blue a weekly Scott McNealy <br></div><div>email announced not only the acquisition of Cobalt Networks, but also <br></div><div>that the company was now fully embracing Linux. The intent certainly <br></div><div>being to capitalize on the Linux experience and market penetration that <br></div><div>Cobalt Networks already had established.<br></div><div><br></div><div>I do recall another funny email a few days later, straight from <br></div><div>corporate HQ in the US. It went along the lines of: "Please stop <br></div><div>pestering the Cobalt guys with inquiries! Sun has 35k employees and <br></div><div>Cobalt has around 200. They get nothing done if everyone continues to <br></div><div>bother them with requests for information!"<br></div><div><br></div><div>But in the end even the acquisition of Cobalt Networks couldn't save <br></div><div>Sun. The burst of the dotcom-bubble contributed to it, but also that <br></div><div>their marketing was ill suited to reap any meaningful benefits from the <br></div><div>Cobalt Networks merger.<br></div><div><br></div><div>A marketing department that was used to deal with banks and government <br></div><div>departments was accustomed to sales moving at glacial speeds at best. <br></div><div>Finalizing the sale of a E16800 flagship "big iron" server back then <br></div><div>might easily have taken two to three years from start to finish. Getting <br></div><div>calls from ISPs that each wanted a truckload of RaQ550s by tomorrow? <br></div><div>That just didn't work so well as nothing at Sun (but the rumor mill) <br></div><div>could move *that* fast.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Without the burst of the dotcom-bubble it *might* eventually have worked <br></div><div>out (I have my doubts), but as it was: It didn't.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Burning through cash like mad Sun had to swing the axe and restructure. <br></div><div>The first victims were most if not all the new acquisitions. Even that <br></div><div>couldn't save the company from having become not only complacent, but <br></div><div>also arrogant towards peers and clients. A few years later Oracle bought <br></div><div>the scraps - lock, stock and barrel. One of the last vestiges of the <br></div><div>company is the corporate sign in front of the Facebook US headquarters, <br></div><div>whose backside still carries the original Sun Microsystems writing that <br></div><div>once was facing outwards instead.<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Closing thoughts:<br></div><div>==================<br></div><div><br></div><div>I never found out who was behind the move that lead to Sun Microsystems <br></div><div>open sourcing the Sausalito code. Whoever that benefactor was: Without <br></div><div>that move we would not be where we are today and neither BlueOnyx nor <br></div><div>BlueQuartz or TLAS would have existed in first place. And tens of <br></div><div>thousands of former Cobalt users would have been left stranded in <br></div><div>"vendor lock-in" without a clear migration path onto other platforms.<br></div><div><br></div><div>So in all this I want to take a special moment to thank your unknown <br></div><div>benefactor with sincere gratitude and admiration. Thank you!<br></div><div><br></div><div>In the early years of the release of the Cobalt sources there were quite <br></div><div>a few competing projects which tried to "make it work" and only our <br></div><div>friend Hisao Shibuya really had the expertise and the tremendous <br></div><div>tenacity to make it work and to be able to build not one, but two <br></div><div>success stories out of that: TLAS for his then employer and the open <br></div><div>source BlueQuartz as his own personal project.<br></div><div><br></div><div>This work was made extraordinarily difficult by there not being a <br></div><div>documentation for the inner workings about the heart and soul of <br></div><div>Sausalito: CCEd, CODB, CCEWrap and how these interfaced with PHP, Perl <br></div><div>and even Python (although Python wasn't used in any meaningful way).<br></div><div><br></div><div>There were also two competing standards for writing GUI pages: The more <br></div><div>modern UIFC and a legacy method that had been used prior and was (for <br></div><div>quite some time) still used in some older pages like the DNS management.<br></div><div><br></div><div>As it was: There was only sparse original documentation that had been <br></div><div>scrounged together over the years. But that wasn't always helpful, as <br></div><div>some of that clearly had not been written by engineers involved in the <br></div><div>development, but perhaps been done by interns or marketing guys.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Any early adopter who sought to benefit from the open sourced code had <br></div><div>to start with a profound knowledge of the original Cobalt interface and <br></div><div>had to reverse engineer and analyze the code to piece together the <br></div><div>understanding of the "big picture". Hisao did that and managed to gain a <br></div><div>profound comprehension of the inner workings of the architecture that <br></div><div>allowed him to succeed where others didn't.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Therefore: My heartfelt thanks to Hisao Shibuya, who carried the torch <br></div><div>for many years and allowed us to kickstart BlueOnyx from the legacy that <br></div><div>he had preserved and expanded.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Lastly: We wouldn't be still around if it were not for each and any of <br></div><div>you: May that be the old timers from the Cobalt days that stuck around, <br></div><div>or the many others who discovered us since then and stayed with us <br></div><div>through all those years. Many thanks for your support and your <br></div><div>confidence in BlueOnyx!<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Where do we go from here?<br></div><div>==========================<br></div><div><br></div><div>As you all know, BlueOnyx is constantly evolving and new features are <br></div><div>getting added. Not too long ago we integrated Radicale CalDAV/CardDAV <br></div><div>and web based FTP access is now (again) built straight into the BlueOnyx <br></div><div>GUI. We ditched the clunky Cobalt Migration Utility and released both <br></div><div>Easy-Migrate and Easy-Backup to make migrations and backups easier and <br></div><div>more reliable.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Over the years a long list of features has been added to BlueOnyx - way <br></div><div>beyond what was included into the original Cobalt RaQs. And that list <br></div><div>will grow even further as time moves on:<br></div><div><br></div><div>See: <a href="https://www.blueonyx.it/features">https://www.blueonyx.it/features</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>This year also saw the release of Aventurin{e} 6110R, which is the <br></div><div>newest release of our Container and VM virtualization platform. It is <br></div><div>also based on BlueOnyx and can be used to virtualize not only BlueOnyx <br></div><div>instances, but also a large selection of other Linux distributions.<br></div><div><br></div><div>See: <a href="https://www.aventurin.net/">https://www.aventurin.net/</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Finally: RedHat yesterday announced the release of RHEL 10 Beta, so we <br></div><div>can expect to see a RHEL10 and (of course) also an AlmaLinux 10 and <br></div><div>RockyLinux 10 sometime in the 2nd Quarter of 2025.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The release of the EL 10 based BlueOnyx 5212R is targeted for the summer <br></div><div>of 2025, but this depends on the general availability of AlmaLinux 10 / <br></div><div>RockyLinux 10 and how fast we can port our code to those. Some <br></div><div>preliminary work on that has already started and will continue on a <br></div><div>moderate pace in the coming months.<br></div><div><br></div><div>With that: Many thanks to you all and have a great weekend!<br></div><div><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><span><pre>-- <br></pre><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="" data-evo-signature-plain-text-mode="">Bluapp AB</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">Rickard Osser</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">CTO</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">Solberga Ängsväg 3</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">125 44 Älvsjö</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">Sweden</div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class=""><br></div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">Web: <a href="http://www.bluapp.com">http://www.bluapp.com</a></div><div data-evo-paragraph="" class="">Mail: <a href="mailto:rickard.osser@bluapp.com">rickard.osser@bluapp.com</a></div></span></div></body></html>