[BlueOnyx:24625] Re: Old Blue Cobalts

[Michael Stauber]

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.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber