[BlueOnyx:24628] Re: Old Blue Cobalts

[^Gecko^]

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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