Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NetBSD Ported To MIPS-Based Cobalt Machines

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-Boy-in-the-bubble dept.

After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available. Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.

7 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Nice work, but... by Lord+of+Caustic+Soda · · Score: 3

    Granted it's good to see another port of Net BSD, but what is the practical use of such a port? Don't people buy Cobalts because they're (supposed to be) easy to maintain and require less administration? Custom installing a new OS onto them seems to defeat that purpose - not to mention you might as well get something with better price/performance (PC) if you're gonna end up customising it yourself. If they get those web based administration functionalities ported as well, that'd be great (can't seem to find any info on that particular direction).

    --
    Kill'em! Kill'em all!
    1. Re:Nice work, but... by hey! · · Score: 3

      Well, that assumes that the only reason to buy a Cobalt is for the ease of configuration.

      I like the small form factor quite a bit. If I had to run a fifty servers, I'd much prefer to run them on two or three 19" racks than have to take up good sized room. Neatness counts. Go into a typical (awful) ISP, and you'll literally see piles of equipment grown willy-nilly connected with rats nests of cables; their service sucks because they can never put their finger on the piece of equipment they need. The best ISP I know handles huge volumes of traffic with an astonishingly small volume of equipment and a tiny but very competent staff.

      The blue plastic is nice too. A lot of time in small offices a server is left out in the open. It should be both unbotrusive and pleasing to look at, not like a hulking piece of industrial equipment.

      En masse, racked up by the dozen, these things would look impressive. I know this is stupid, and what counts is whats inside, but the bossman likes to show off to his pals and clients, and if you can keep him happy, your life is easier.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  2. Important question! by Jeffrey+Baker · · Score: 3
    Does BSD have driver support for the LCD?!?!?!? Nothing is more useful than a rack full of RaQs, scrolling stock quotes across their LCD panels :)

    -jwb

    (FYI: In their Linux distro, the writelcd command twiddles the font panel display)

  3. OpenBSD up next by tmu · · Score: 3

    Cobalt has seen a number of fairly serious security problems in the past six months. Since a NetBSD port is now done, an OpenBSD port cannot be far behind.

    OpenBSD is my favorite, secure out-of-the box distro for general purpose, outside the firewall use.

    Then again, the Cobalt hardware is far from cheap, given what it is. What you're really paying for is the integration and ease of management. Get ride of that, and I'll take a cheap intel clone in a rackmount case any day.

  4. Cobalt web-boxes. by jon_l · · Score: 3

    Oh, those delightful 19" x 1" blue boxes. Cobalt Linux would *always* crash under heavy load. During a freeze you had to re-configure them with their tiny LCD screen and 4 directional arrow buttons (that didn't always respond).

    Good idea, bad implementation. A stable kernel will now render these once-ghetto boxen useful/efficient for web hosting providers.

    --
    Jon L.
  5. NetBSD is good stuff. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4


    It's good to see publicity for this little-known and under-appreciated OS, which, despite it's relative obscurity, was the originator of the other two BSDs.

    Right now, about the only thing NetBSD doesn't run on is my HP48, but I hear someone's working on it. That's the truly great thing about NetBSD: it'll run on anything. The moment you get your new Internet-enabled refrigerator, NetBSD will be waiting for you as Linux developers scramble to produce working code. But I think the relationship between NetBSD (and BSD) in general and Linux is a friendly one, with each sharing ideas and (most importantly) applications. Sure, there are some idiotic zealots on both sides, but they're restrained to making fools of themselves on Slashdot, so no real harm is done.

    But just keep in mind that that next gizmo you buy may well carry a Daemon inside...

  6. Good news! by DeathBunny · · Score: 4

    This is good news! The Cobalts (Qubes at least, I haven't worked with a RAQ) use a forked version of a really old kernel, and have some wierd limitations. For example, according to Cobalt tech support, thier version of the kernal can only support 256 open file descriptors. Because of that, Samba is set up to only allow 100 simultanious open files. That's fine if your only using it to serve up Word and Excel files, but their are many programs that need that many files open for even 1 user. (almost any Cobal program, for example, including 3 accounting packages I've tried to install on Qubes).

    The Qubes are really cool little devices. I'd love to see Cobalt integrate support for thier hardware into the main stream Linux kernel so that Qube users could more easily upgrade to greater functionality. This NetBSD port at least provides one good option for Qube users who are outgrowing the cute little web-interface and need a little more flexibility that what comes "pre-packaged" in the Qube. I'd rather be able to update them to a newer Linux kernel, or better yet a new version of a fairly stock Linux distro, but this is pretty darn good.