Post Cobalt Alternatives?

wizman asks: "I co-own a small ISP that does a bit of web hosting - probably less than 150 domains. We have been using the Cobalt RAQ product line ever since our beginnings. We are outgrowing our current RAQ and have been planning to purchase a newer one. However, it seems that ever since Sun purchased Cobalt, they have been moving away from the RAQ platform. Because of the incredible slowless in which Sun patches vulnerabilities (just now seeing a new SSH package) on top of a number of other annoyances, I am now seriously considering other options." Current RAQ sysadmins: what are your plans for the near future? What would you do if you owned Cobalt RAQs? Would they stay or would they go?

"Let's break this question into two parts:

a) What have customers been migrating to? I am really impressed with web://cp, and have also investigated Plesk, cPanel, and a few other commercial ones. Most of them require some specific version of Red Hat, which is slightly irritating. I have also considered stock Apache/qmail/vmailmgr/etc, but I'm looking for something that grants a bit more power and flexibility to my end users.

b) How was the migration? We have hundreds and hundreds of e-mail accounts, aliases, mailing lists, etc on our existing RAQ's, and would like the transition to be as seamless as possible. I am looking to finally get around the info@domain1,info@domain 2 issue. Users don't seem to grasp the concept of making an account without a generic name and aliasing info@ to it, so any experiences on this are more than welcome! Our staff is rather limited (I'm pretty much it tech-wise), so the smoother the better!

I am also open to arguments for keeping the RAQ line. I have read that they are open sourcing sausalito and cme, but it looks like there is no short-term stable release of this. I'm looking at a few weeks to a few months as a migration timeframe."

Comments

Upgrade to a modern distribution like debian

[dotslash]

I have upgraded all our RAQs to the newest debian (woody/stable) distribution. The RAQ can be firmware upgraded to support 2.4 kernels. Add to that a modern distribution and it becomes a pretty good server. As for the ssh patch: apt-get upgrade fixed that within an hour of the anouncement. Debian rules!

As someone who's made the transition...

[rute20740]

I migrated from a Cobalt RaQ setup after many many frustrating moments with the whole net appliance idea in general.

I also needed the migration to be as smooth as possible, including all user auth, mail boxes/folders, lists and aliases.

I decided to go with MySQL based authentication on Postfix, Courier-IMAP, Apache, and ProFTPd, all running on Debian. I Wrote a little web front end using PHP for user administration, and voila, we now have a much more flexible system. All MySQL auth patches and plugins are available in Debian's apt archive.

Check out how-tos on the subject here, here, and here.

It took a little effort to get all of this working, but a little effort went a long way. I was basically able to duplicate the RaQ's functionality on a Debian system that I had full control over as far as software updates, kernel and hardware.

To top it all off, I replicated the config and used Heartbeat to make this into a high availability pair.

ISP Solutions

[Lando]

Working with a number of ISP's, ie running one myself in the past. I would recommend going with C-panel... The system works well and is updated quite often.

Rolling your own distribution and keeping apache/postfix/frontpage extentions/webmin/etc up to date takes more time than it's worth and eats your profit margin up.

Depending on the space you have available, I would go with some 1u or 2u units. Frankly with 150 domains you can probably run all of them on 1-2 systems with decent hardware.

I strongly recommend against plesk, as they have a number of issues or have had in the past.