[BlueOnyx:24626] Re: Old Blue Cobalts

[Rickard Osser]

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.
>
>-- 
>With best regards
>
>Michael Stauber
>_______________________________________________
>Blueonyx mailing list
>Blueonyx at mail.blueonyx.it
>http://mail.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx

-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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