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

Re:Upgrade to a modern distribution like debian

[FattMattP]

Does this include the MIPS based raqs like the Raq2 or just the Intel based ones?

XServe is the way to go (I run an ISP)

[numbski]

I decommed several cobalts and replaced them with XServes when i came in. My clients have been nothing but happy with them.

Load webmin for the web interface, use squirrelmail for webmail.

DNS comes preloaded.

Of course, if it hurts your pocketbook, you could always go with a Dual G5 for the same price. That of course means you'd use a wire rack instead of a rackmount telecom rack, but it depends on your space constraints. I have both available to me.