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

NetGear Wireless Hubs

[Anonymous Coward]

These are great. You just buy them in bulk (about $100 each), install NetBSD on them, and you're good to go. Disk space isn't much of a problem as long as you have a very thin installation of Apache and do not write logs (so the only writing to the flash is of the website's own pages.) Use the built-in Ethernet for the actual connection to the outside world and the wireless link as a secure channel to any database you intend to use, or a NFS share for a larger site/somewhere to stick the logs/email storage if you're using your machines to maintain email. An old Thinkpad with an 802.11b card and a 200Mb HD will usually be more than enough for that kind of application, and that type of thing contains it's own battery back-up.

The best part is you can have twenty of them piled in a box. No need for rack mounting, just throw them all in higglety-pigglety, plugged in of course, and it just works. Power consumption is so low that you can basically run twenty or so reliably and securely using two daisy-chained UPSes.

My own ISP is planning a migration over to this type of technology within the next few months. It's cheap, a maintanence paradise, and a vast improvement upon the usual Wintel/etc "commodity" (ever notice that commody and commode share the same derivation) boxes. I sincerely recommend it.

Re:SunFire

[duffbeer703]

Too bad a Xeon with extra L3 cache beat the crap out of the 64 bit athlon chips!