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Has Anyone Played With Gateway Micro Server?
alexhmit01 asks: "So my friend's father bought a new set of machines for his office from Gateway, and they included with it this little cube called a Micro Server, which he gave to his son. Naturally, the first thing that we did was crack it open, and saw that it includes a PCI slot (some expandability, currently has a modem that we'll yank), and 10 GB hard drive. We're flipping through the manual, assuming that it is an NT machine when I notice they talk about SMB shares, so I'm assuming SAMBA. I get to the back and see two documents, the BSD license and the GPL. We check out the specs, it runs a 64-bit RISC processor (I'm assuming Arm), and Linux 2.0! So how many IT people have gotten one of these and decided to actually put it to use? Any suggestions? "
"They include some easy-to-use utilities, which is nice as someone else can administer the thing when we're done setting it up.
Now, their firewall support, etc., is lacking (as it is Linux 2.0) compared to the stuff that Linux 2.2 supports, but I don't want to give up the flexibility of their tools.
Has anyone done much work on one of these? We're planning to stick on sshd and hack around with it (after imaging the drive) and I was wondering what others have done with this device. It seems like a great piece of hardware, it's tiny... it's adorable."
It would be nice to get more stats on these. Do they come with a network card? What kind of video do they support? What processor options are there?
IP Filter
Further, the registry is the single largest cause of problems in Windows, in my experience. What happens when you screw up your registry? Well, unless you really know your Windows (and most people don't) or were fortunate to have a backup copy of the registry just lying around, it's reinstall time. Hell, half the NT admins I know encourage a reinstall even in the above cases.
Please, read Linux-Kernel, there was a thread about this a few months ago IIRC, and why it's such a bad idea. I like my many config files. Now what would be GOOD is a common configuration grammar. Until then, I'll keep making money as a UNIX admin.
will these be rendered useless with the windows 2000 kerbos discussion that was posted a few weeks ago?
Perhaps Gateway can legally impliment the MS additions to the samba protocol to let 2000 boxes access it properly.
their usefulness on windos networks will be short lived if they can't.
As numerous other posters have mentioned, the little cube is a Qube, by Cobalt Networks. It turns out there's a little coincidence with the topic of the previous story on the Voodoo5.
The Chairman of the Board at Cobalt -- Gordon Campbell -- was also the Chairman of the Board at 3dfx. He's not too popular with investors right now. TDFX has been gradually sliding down from its all time high of around 35 to 8 or so, with Campbell busy selling shares all the way down. Since it's IPO, COBT stock has also plunged, from a post-IPO high of 172 down to 28.
Give me a break. There are far more interesting subjects to do an Ask Slashdot subject on. Let alone something they covered TWICE already. This is the third time they did this story. I don't mind repackaging content. But when the point is to give an opinion about a product and the whole thing has been covered twice already in the same place it's redundent. In general I don't care if /. reposts things. Just don't do it 3 times. And don't make it repetitve... at least have some new information.
PHP and MySQL are avilable for this box.
Cobalt has the RPMs for both at the following location.
ftp.cobaltnetworks.com/pub/experimental/
There are lots of other OSS software packages for this machine I rememeber seeing, LDAP and POSTGRess as well.
Also it has an X11 client installed on the machine.
If you can't figure out how to install the RPMs on this machine...
We've been looking at a way to fly low cost Linux boxes under the radar screens of some IT shops in some of our clients. The idea is that a non-traditional form factor will not set off the allergy to nonMS operating systems that their IT mandarins tend to have.
I've looked a variety of prebuilt boxes in non-traditional form factors; I'm testing a 1U rackmount "RedRak" server from Netmachines right now.
The value proposition of these appliance boxes always seems the same. Looked at as systems, they give very good value compared to Windows boxen; looked at as collections of discrete parts they are rather pricey.
The other thing appliances tend to have is web based administration. The RedRak box I'm testing has a pretty comprehensive set of services you can configure from the web admin tool: apache, samba, appletalk, nntp, dns, sendmail/pop/imap, ldap etc. However if you are not in a benign environment (unconnected to Internet or behind well managed firewall), you still need to be able to comb through logs and figure out what's going on, and to be able to install updates.
I will say that I had the RedRak box out of the box and serving SMB on our network in less than five minutes -- not too shabby. The RedRak box also has a quick swap (not hot swap) drive tray. This would be great for quick repurposing of a box, say in an ISP server farm. However, it lacks a floppy or CD drive; the inclusion of a recovery CD is somewhat a mystery to me here.
In any case I'd be very interested in experiences people have had with inexpensive x86 Linux or BSD boxes in non-traditional form factors.
-Matt Leo
matt@acrcorp.com
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I highly doubt that Cobalt will move to 2.2 on the MIPS devices (Qube, Raq2).
Their latest and greatest Raq3 uses an AMD K6 and 2.2 is, of course, supported.
I have a Qube 2 under my desk at work, which I have abandoned due to the lack of 2.2.
If you need a small server like this and want Linux 2.2 on it, get a Netwinder. It's an ultra cool box, I recommend plugging in a monitor and keyboard. It's useable as a desktop machine. There's even a desktop version specifically for that which has NTSC I/O.
That circle thing on the side is a speaker, btw. A voice sounds "Welcome to Netwinder" when the system is properly up.
There are rackmount versions, too. You can fit two of them in a single 1u space.
Of course, the coolest thing is the hackability. Check out www.netwinder.org to find all kinds of great docs, software, and ideas. There's a pic there somewhere of a stack of netwinder guts set up as a Beowulf. The OS is a modified recent RedHat. You'll find it easier to get software compiled on it than the Qube.
Needless to say, one of these babies occupy a space on *top* of my desk.
it is a MIPS not an ARMS, a MIPS R4000.
To see what a dmesg output looks like, checkout the port of it on the netbsd homepage. You might also find more technical info about it the archive of their mailing list.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
I knew I'd seen this before =) http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/08/1 36255.shtml Should be interesting to see new comments, now that they have been out for a while.
We have one at work... they are a neat toy, but just that, a toy. In a production environment, its practically worthless. No capability to upgrade or implement security patches. The Admin account is denied access to half the system, and Gateway doesn't bother to tell you the root password. In an uber small business, it would be handy as a quick and dirty firewall/router/dhcp server for 40 or 50 light users, maybe 10 heavy ones. Out of the box it'd be cake to say, share a DSL line or cable modem. The web based interface is admittedly slick... I have seen people who've never touched linux breeze thru the setup of this thing like cake. Things that bothered me included the lack of low level root access (I wanted to change init scripts... no dice.) and the seemingly idiotic out of the box setup to run mgetty on the serial port, instead of an agetty which would be mildly useful, considering the pile of VTx20's we have in the lab. One of these days I'm gonna yank the drive, boot it as a slave, and edit the passwd file so i can use the root account and at least make the thing somewhat useful.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
ARMs are 32 bit only.
I think you'll find its a Cobalt cube which uses a MIPS.
I was told the other day they were rather paranoid about not letting you get root on boxes you buy from them so as to make it easy for them to maintain.
... that they dropped the Cobalt design.
It used a MIPS and Linux. The design was wide open, the power miniscule. (Something like 7 watts running flat out, as I recall. Same as an incandescent nightlight.) The fan was just so people would trust it. It dissipated so little power that a fan wasn't necessary unless you were running it in an oven - at which point it was counterproductive. B-) )
I used one of those in a previous job. We were developing for embedded MIPS and needed a compiler. Gnu wasn't supporting cross-platform and we didn't know about Cygnus' patches to fix that. (Over a K of lines when they got fed up and forked the code base.) So we bought a Qube as an utterly cheap way ($1K) to get a MIPS/GNU development platform.
My main gripe with the Cobalt Qube was that the 12V for the disk drive didn't go through the switching regulator. If they'd regulated it so it would be reliable with a raw supply from about 11.25 to 13.75 it would have been IDEAL to babysit a cabin powered off a solar/lead-acid system.
(Or almost ideal. The single PCI expansion slot - intended for a particular 100Mbps ethernet card (to supliment the built-in 10-base-t) - was only fed the +5 supply, which limited flexibility a bit.)
Loading a new kernel was interesting. You had to name it this particular name that looked like a game in a directory owned by one of Cobalt's developers. (Don't recall it at the moment.) It was the only other file the ROM bootloader would boot.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.syrinex.com
syrinex sells linux boxes that are designed to be headless servers, firewalls, ftp,web,email, etc like a cobalt cube BUT in a more conventional and expandable form. check them out...we may be buying soon for our 'network edge'.
Yes i recall a post on slashdot a few months back saying gateway would be reselling cobalt cubes.
I'm a little bit surprised that it's a cobalt and it's running a 2.0 kernel. I had thought that the Cobalt stuff had all migrated to 2.2 at this point (I know that they stuck with 2.0 for quite a while, but it's been quite a while). We have a raq3i here running the 2.2(.5, it looks like) kernel. Maybe the qubes are still at 2.0, though.
They are really excellent little boxes for people who don't know what they're doing (they're underpowered and kindof annoying for people who do, but that's a separate story). We use them for schools and small offices that don't have an on-site network administrator but want to get local mail and drive sharing. The fact that they do smb, nfs *and* appletalk is the big selling point for some places.
The big gripe: why the hell don't they do print spooling? It's not hard to do (basically you get the lpd srpm from redhat, you rebuild (because most of the boxes are MIPS, you install and you configure. not rocket science). This is something that lots of offices need and they just don't do at all, as far as I know. annoying.
I for one looked at this article (love a geeky mystery and all) and probably scrolled right by the Cobalt/Gateway deal article.
This is also something the mainstream press does all the time -- revisits or repackages old info in a way that makes it more relevant or interesting.
And finally, Ask Slashdot is really Ask Slashdot's Readers, so Slashdot is just being true to its approach by letting US tell the poster it's a relabelled Cobalt Qube.
Next time I get mod points, I'll think seriously about giving a -1 Troll to gratuitous Slash-bashing like this.
(Damn, now I've got to wonder if I just fed a Troll!)
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Wow- you mean the slashdot guys don't maintain a photographic memory recall of every story they have posted since 1997? Just destroy my childish illusions, why don't you.
I would like to take on of the cubes and use it as a car mp3 player. I'm sure hardware pornographers somewhere have it well documented.
If you were to settle for an uglier case.. you could probably get the same functionality for a lot cheaper.. I know of one package (sharethenet)which is aiming for the some similar functionality.. Has anyone used this.. or has anyone used any other products/distros that are basically made to be set up on an old "headless" machine and simply administered through a browser?..
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air and light and time and space
Wow.. That looks like a cool little box.. more info here
I guess the main selling point would be simple set up and config tools.. You could probably build something with more power for cheaper, but simplicity can count for a lot in this market..
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air and light and time and space
What about cannibalising an old sparc IPX or LX box for the power supply and case only?
So, the processor would appear to be SGI MIPS-based. StrongArm is 32-bit (and what Netwinders use)
It is indeed a Cobalt Qube... I was recently at a trade show where both devices were on display at different booths. There is no visible difference (aside from colour). The Gateway one was retailing for quite a lot more however. Basic details about the Qube are here and the details about the Gateway Micro Server can be found here.
Very true, very true. It's the form factor that sells the thing. Try building yourself something as compact as this - good luck. My current home network is two NICS, a hard drive, a 32mb SIMM, a Pentium 90, a floppy drive, and integrated graphics. I could easily fit that in a small, cuboidal boxy type thing - assuming I could find one. Instead I'm enslaved to this massive AT case with a huge AT power supply and room for 3 more expansion cards that I'm not going to use. It's all kind of pointless, but going smaller costs a lot of money. Hence they can charge over a thousand dollars for a mediocre box with 32mb of RAM. I mean come on - I could build something like that for under $300 if I was so inclined.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
In a business environment, it doesn't make sense to waste staff hours building PCs from parts unless their is a very good reason for doing it. Part of engineering is knowing which tasks should be done in-house and which tasks should be farmed out to other firms or accomplished with COTS products.
I recently bought one of the low-end IBM Netfinity servers for use as a Linux system. I was very impressed with the quality of the system. The hardware was high quality, with lots of little features to make life easier for the administrator and installer. It was tested and certified for a number of server operating systems, including Linux. The case has good airflow and thermal design. The hard drives have rubber shock mounts to reduce vibration and noise. The system makes almost no noise when running. It included a complete and well-written set of documentation, diagnostics and setup software, and a three year on-site service warranty. IBM also has a web site with useful software and hardware technical support information, device drivers and software updates. I don't mean this to be a commercial for IBM, my point is that IBM added considerable value to the system in comparison to a generic box assembled from parts. The price was about $2500, including 128 MB of ECC RAM, 9 GB fast/wide SCSI hard drive and 10/20 GB SCSI tape drive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Seconded. When I had a solo, with a bad battery, they refused to swap the battery for a few months, because I was running Unix, and they were sure it was a Unix problem. Finally, I got them to swap the entire fucking *CHASSIS* (including the LCD display and 32MB ram) twice, and that didn't work, so I called and said "okay, now, how about we just *try* my crazy theory that the battery itself is dodgy".
:)
Not very helpful. When I called a while later to ask about a non-Windows laptop, the sales guy *laughed at me*. Not "hah-hah, that's funny", but "what the fuck are you smoking, not using Windows".
Let's just say I'm no longer a Gateway customer, huh?
(Oh, and of course, they spam.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
They did a story on this back in October... You'd think that people would search for stuff before they'd submit it...
I have one of these little toys, got it last weekend.
www.zblackbox.com
Telnet is only turned on when you toggle a couple of buttons on the back of the machine. It only allows signons for one hour then turns the service off. However currently connected sessions stay on.
It's using a MIPS processor from Quantum Effect Devices (www.qedinc.com). Note that despite their name they have nothing to do with quantum computing.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
This is, of course, highly ironic, considering that gateway disowned me when they found out I had installed linux on my Solo. They wouldn't even tell me what was included in a BIOS update.
see www.cobalt.com
If you've ever supported a Desktop, or user level UNIX environment, you'll know really quick why they don't want you to have root on the machine. If was going to provide software support for all of these machines, I wouldn't give the users root either. Especially if they can do most of the administration thru the web front end, maybe with a little help from sudo or something.
;-)
Also, you can just boot it into single user mode and get root if you need it...
http://www.gatewayatwork. com/prod/sb_apsrv_features.shtml
Web site publishing,with integrated support for CGI, Perl scripts, and FrontPage server extensions
Local E-mail hosting (individual mail, groups, auto reply/forward, scheduled delivery, multi-drop, SMTP/POP3/IMAP4)
Cross-platform file sharing (Windows 95/98/NT, Macintosh)
Message board
FTP services
Full PPP router, DNS and DHCP server Packet Filtering Firewall security, access control, and Network Address Translation
Linux 2.0 with Web server pre-installed Document indexing and searching, archival and retrieval More specs:
http://www.gatewayatwork. com/prod/sb_ms100_prodinfo.shtml
Found this on Gateway's website, looks like the beast we're talking about here.
Gateway Micro Server 100
The ARM arch doesn't have a 64-bit variant, so whatever chip is in there, it ain't ARM-based. 64-bit embedded RISC processor probably means MIPS, but not necessarily...
Once again, Slashdot doesn't read Slashdot.
How about:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 10/13/132216.shtml
or even
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 12/08/136255.shtml
Where Hemos acknowledges that slashdot doesn't read slashdot on this very topic.
As for this story:
It's MIPS, not ARM, yes, it is Samba, and yes, it's self-hosting.
Oh, and it is Apache, and Cobalt did a pretty nice job with the web management.
They work great for their intended purpose, but get a little wonky if you try to do things that the web-gui can't do.
But you can always give up and put NetBSD on it.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
People probably ignore the secondary costs of operating a largish data-centre. Afterall, when buying a car, is all you look at only the peak RPM of the 'Motor Inside (TM)'. I would be interested to see whether anyone could post some rough figures for cost per square metre for hosting a bunch of racks. You've got uninterruptable power supplies (min 300-500K upfront capital costs), air-conditioning (we're talking heavy duty water coolers), Occupational Health and Safety issues (imagine 2000 fans going at once), physical security, etc. The question I suppose is does the savings in form factor (low heat dissipation, with resuling savings in fan) give a better value-for money for your targetted system load? If you've got only a few big dynamic databases and lotsa static pages you can probably get away with a combination of several CacheRaqs and say an Origin 200 for fast parallel RAID I/O. The mix of machines might give better overall mean time between failures at accetpable cost. Also keep in mind that your techies won't be too happy at getting up at 4am in the morning to fix problems. A reasonable degree of redundancy is useful.
... the sunk cost is in the infrastructure but the value is in the services.
What I see happening is that we are getting past the analogous stage where electricity generators are a novelty and we are shifting into decent web-engineering, much as the early layout of the electric grid standardised (or commodidised) transformers, generators, motors etc. You will probably see similar moves in the computer industry as the infrastructure goes invisible. You won't be buying a computer but a URL with guarenteed x Gigabytes storage accessible anywhere in the world at a predetermined level of service/performance. Slide-in storage modules (like for portables) for CD/DVD/HD/etc will become the norm and if the hardware vendors stop squabbling among themselves for specification control of the bus and I/O plugs, something similar for processors. Take a look at Sony's iLink (aka Apple Firewire). The reason why consumer electronics is the key is that the mass scales of economies will swamp anything a dedicated system will produce except in niche areas. People forget that it's the software/services that people are willing to pay for. Stability and service becomes a more important factor once a certain level of features is in place. If the Cobalt team can offer a decent price-competitive solution below the kink in the cost curve (the point where the plant pays for itself and thus competes with other paid-off fabs) where the marginal costs are so much smaller, then good luck to them.
Repeat after me
LL
 All I can say is that Cobalt must be raking it in hand-over-fist. Their "newest" design is the Raq III, which ran on a 300 mHz AMD processor last time I checked. Of course, they're targetting non-processor-intensive jobs, so it can swing, but, without the cute boxes and web interface, these would be $400 machines.
Oh well, I hear they're quite cute and functional, so enjoy the toy!
--JRZ
They cost Aust $2999 Performance was fairly low, topping out at 260,000 bytes per second of throughput.
here is part of the article..
The Gateway server is easily the cutest of the servers. A little black box not much bigger than a tissue box, it sits and grins at you with its single huge green LED across the front.
As far as specifications go, the Gateway was very different to the other servers tested in that it had a dedicated RISC processor, and no option of a keyboard/mouse/monitor for installation. To set the machine up, you plug it in, program the network details (IP Address, Subnet Mask, Gateway Etc from a small 6 button control panel with a 2 line segmented LCD mounted on the back of the unit. From here, all the setup can be done via a nice friendly web interface or CD Setup Wizard.
One of the things we noted was the slow boot time of this machine. If the machine is not shut down properly, it takes an inordinate amount of time to check the disk on restart.
Transfer of data to the server can be done using FTP, SMB (Windows file sharing) and Appletalk. Finding the root of the web server involved a little poking around though the web interface, but once found, we were able to FTP the files with little trouble. The FTP transfer was a little slower than the other machines, which led us to believe that the gateway was not in the same league as its competitors in the raw speed stakes.
In the static tests, we confirmed that the lack of RAM and slower hard disk of the Gateway made it struggle as far as performance is concerned. In fact, during the test, I received the following e-mail from the unit:
There are several other monitoring features built in including a user disk space monitor that tells you when disk space is running short for a particular user.
The Gateway has a backup facility built in, though we did not test it. There is no redundancy of disk drives or power supplies so the server will need to be removed from service to have these parts replaced or upgraded. There is very little about the Gateway that can be upgraded, you could upgrade to more disk space and add more RAM but the CPU is a RISC chip, and is not in a socket. There are 2 10/100 Ethernet ports and a modem, allowing you to set this server up as a small office router with dialup Internet Access.
A 5 port DSS-5+ Dlink Fast Ethernet Switch is included in the package. The micro server will run as a small departmental File Server with quotas, a DHCP Server, and an e-mail server.
Other features of note are:
Packet Filtering (Firewall), Web & DNS Caching, Private discussion Groups, Web based HTML creation and FrontPage Extensions.
A simple to use Setup Card and CD Setup Wizard (Win 32 only) was included, although not tested. Mark
Mark RMIT IT Test Lab Engineer http://www.geekzone.com.au/~msnell
I've got a Gateway MicroServer 100 at the office - and to date, I still can't tell you if it's a mistake or not.
For inital setup, it's pretty friggin' non-technical. There's a 2 line LCD screen on the back - put in the IP, and go. It's now online, and ready to be administered via a web browser. Set up your users, and your groups, and you are ready to go.
But, there's some downsides. Horsepower on it seems pretty good - the network at the office is a homogenous environment of Win9x, NT, 2000, and Linux clients and boxen. For a quick setup for a nontechnical person, it's perfect. However, if you want to get under the hood - that a bit uglier. For those who don't know, this is a "server appliance" so there's no local logins - no keyboard or screen for that, just a two line LCD screen that shows it's status at boot time.
Apache comes pre-configured, along with SAMBA, and a couple other goodies (email, etc.) However, nothing advanced like MySQL, etc. Telnet is disabled (not nessisarily a bad thing), and the box has a maintance mode that enables telnet for an hour. Otherwise, the only way to play with it is the web-based administration - which happens to be quite inadequate for my tastes. Setting up users is easy, but, it's not very robust, and sometimes the server gets paranoid for no reason - SAMBA will drop them, and won't let them back in with out tricking it.
It's got it's own system for getting updates from GW2k, but, I've yet to see a package of updates.
If you want a real server, this isn't it. If you want a quick to install system for small-time file sharing, with very little setup, this is it. It's great for sending out to a site with non-tech people in it. For me - well, I'm not so fond of it in many ways. Lack of power for administration, somewhat slow SAMBA responsiveness at times, sometimes it has user rights issues (oh, and SERIOUS problems with the user / group quota idea - it doesn't seem to take me seriously quite often), and it's designed to be a 'hands off' type of toy. All of those things together make it not so hot of a toy.
And as much as it will sound like flame bait - I still prefer my old diehard, no-reboots except hardware failure, dual PPro NT 4.0 server to this thing. Of course, I'd prefer a REALLY well configured Linux boxen to my NT server - and the Cobalt Qube2... er... Gateway MicroServer 100 doen't count at all.
(And for the record - the fact that the box is there is my own stinkin' fault. I wanted something that would be dead simple for someone else to admin while I was away on trips... I'm not sure what I SHOULD have choosen instead.)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org