Slashdot Mirror
Move Over Mini-ITX, Here Comes The gigaQube
Jim Ethanol writes "Since there's been a lot of interest lately in Mini ITX based servers I thought the Slashdot crowd might enjoy checking out Project gigaQube. The gigaQube is a modified Cobalt Qube 2 server appliance with 240 Gigabytes of storage running NetBSD's Mips R5000 based Cobalt port. Cobalt Qube's are quiet, cool looking little (7.25 x 7.25 x 7.75 inch) servers that when modified, make a powerful home server solution. They also seem to have achieved 'fetish' status in Japan. See some gigaQube action shots here, or check its vitals here."
Slashdot now knows that his library contains "The Joy of Cybersex" -- check the action shots. *shakes head*
"Also, I had just won a 120 Gig drive from my buddy on a bet about eating hot sauce." theres even a link it seems to a .mpg (have not been able to look at it im on dialup) i wish i had the money to waste on bets like that.
as more and more data is being stored (TV shows, Movies, Music and yes Pr0n too) the drives are being filled at an alarming rate
saving HDTV is killing my disks I don't know what it is like in the US but here in Japan its a 19 meg stream for each channel
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
The /. article mentions that this could be a replacement for Mini-ITX, but in reality, I suspect that you could use (with quite a bit of modding) a Mini-ITX in one of these boxes intead of the existing board.
A Mini-ITX would offer a nice replacement for the Mips-based CPU and dependence on old SIMM modules for memory.
Seriously though, I'll have to replace my server, a pretty cool home-built computer inside the fantastic, cool-looking Antec 1080 (I think it has eight fans all over) case, and I'd been thinking about putting it in one of them sexy, tiny black nForce Shuttle computers, would have been fantastic, but maybe this is a nice alternative.
I think this line from the page:
Is more interesting then the project itself.
Fortress of Insanity
Blogzine
Man, Cobalt Qubes have been out forever. I remember evaluating one at my old ISP job in 1998 (THAT takes me back). They're decent boxes, I suppose, though a bit overpriced for what you get. It was mainly notable for being the first popular "it runs linux but you'd never know it" machine.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Strapping a drive to the back of a CPU board with ty-wraps is not my idea of building a small server. But whatever floats your boat...
128 MB is not enough to do anything useful. Why is it limited to such a small amount?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I built a Mini-ITX file server. It has three 120 GB hard drives; they are running Linux software RAID, so I have the same amount of storage as the gigaQube... but I can have any one hard drive die and I'm okay.
The gigaQube is smaller, but my Mini-ITX file server is small enough for me. It's also extremely quiet.
Details:
It's a VIA EPIA-M motherboard, with a 1 GHz "Nehemiah" core. It has two IDE controllers onboard, and I used an IDE controller PCI card to get another available controller for the third drive. The case is a common Mini-ITX case, almost a cube shape, which I got at the Fry's Electronics in my area. One drive is mounted in the (only) hard drive holder in the case; one drive is mounted in the 3.5" external bay; and one drive is mounted in an adapter bracket which is mounted in one of the two 5.25" bays. I actually have one 5.25" bay free, but I don't need it for anything. I use the 100 Mbit Ethernet jack on the motherboard for hooking the server up to my net, and I have Debian GNU/Linux (stable branch) installed. It's a sweet little server.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Sure, if you want to spend at least an extra $1000.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
No Linux Kernel 2.x or NetBSD
Read the damm article.
It seems that alimis what generates the most noise, which explains why a laptop alim quiets the system a lot...
but with "standard" hardware, you can use a silentmax alim, and if you don't use horrible little fans on the motherboard and graphic card, the system makes virtually no noise at startup -- I mean no noise; not little noise, no noise at all (you can hear the hard drive and the CPU fan but only after several minutes, when the CPU is hot and you're manipulating big files).
Reading or burning CDs or DVDs is always more noisy, but with this, you get a full-tower with virtually as many drives as you want inside. It is more bulky, but it combines both server (for local network only of course) and workstation.
I recently bought a Shuttle SK41G box as a replacement server. I stuck in an xp1900+ processor, 80gig WD drive, a dvd/cd reader, and 512Meg memory. It has room for one more drive since I didn't bother to get a floppy for it (who uses floppies these days?). This baby is way overkill for my server needs. Running apache, exim, spamassassin, clamav, samba 3, and mysql (plus the usual array of programs), it hardly makes a mark in the CPU usage.
It's small, relatively quiet (though not as quiet as the k6-2 400Mhz system it replaced) and has been rock solid.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I bet people would love it.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
If I were Sun, I'd churn out MIPS boxes like this by the hundreds. I have a need for two machines (that I don't have money for right now). One is to be a file server, and the other is to be a firewall/router for my crappy dialup (which will one day be broadband of some sort). A machine like the Qube could fit the bill for both of these machines, with one being configured for RAID and having lots of storage, and the other being beefy enough to handle a home internet connection (better have a serial port so I can hook my USR ext modem to it!) I'd seriously consider a Qube that didn't need to be fan cooled and didn't consume a lot of power. Apple only makes one type of computer, and it's _way_ too expensive for home needs. I can build a Mini-ITX system with an x86 processor in it for not a lot of money, so there's Sun's starting point.
Supporting this thing would be a piece of cake. Compile a NetBSD distro or Linux distro for the machine, and include it with the machine. Guarantee good hardware, and this could be an easy cash cow. The OSS community would handle most of the rest.
Jim Ethanol writes "Since there's been a lot of interest... running NetBSD's Mips R5000... check its vitals here."
If it's running NetBSD, I suppose checking its vitals would be an appropriate thing to do.
Wow! Do you know Vin Diesel? You just need to find a third guy named "Alexander Isopropyl" or something and you'd have your own little gang!
Thanks for driving up the price of the Qube I was bidding on on Ebay. I guess I'll have to go put together a mini-ITX box just to spite the article. There should be an Ebay listing that comes with a slashdot article, kinda like the premium listings where you end up at the top of the page, but a lot more expensive...
People are the problem, stop procreation now!
So, you can get a 300 MB drive, put it on a 17cm (7.5" :-) board and get something about half the volume of the "cube" for almost certainly less cost. And it still runs Linux, and it has all those 386 RPM's that you can install.
If you really must have a cube form-factor, there are cuboid cases around the same size at www.mini-itx.com
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
A triangle.
I've shelved the Qube 1, and now a PII-500 running FreeBSD takes care of *my* home storage (caching, web serving, mysql, php, wireless access point, you-name-it) needs...
Should I be exhuming my Qube 1 and making something of it, or stick it on eBay, or stick it back in the cupboard? Anyone interested in it?
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
alrightalrightalrightalrightalrightalrightalrighta lrightalright
etc
Dan Ingals has built a neat linux/squeak based system on ITX.
"We have now assembled a software kernel that includes a lean Linux base (modified by Ian Piumarta to provide direct frame buffer display), and a full Squeak 3.6 image and VM, all fitting on a 32M CF card with about 10MB left over. For my needs this is an ideal solution: buy a Silent Station, stick in a CF card, and resell it as a graphical weather station. It's especially nice that the Silent Station uses a 12v supply, which means you can hack together a 5-hour UPS from a lead-acid battery and a trickle charge circuit."
Uhh. Is this a trick question? Of course you can run an SMTP server or web server on NetBSD.
Keep an eye out for a bong in the action shots. Just what were these people smoking when they made this?!
Well, the passive cooled Via mini-ITX and nano-ITX mother boards are there but the power supplies for them aren't there yet. They have these whiney little 4cm or 6cm fans. No you need a nice slow rpm 12cm fan. Pulls lots of air and is quiet. Though I see Nexus and Papst have some really slow 8cm fans that might work. Silicon Acoustics carries a lot of this kind of stuff including 12cm fan PSUs, though I haven't dealt with them yet. Unfortunately it's mostly for full sized P4 based systems which by definition have a whiney cpu fan.
How is this "insightful"?
Solaris doesn't have a MIPS port, even.
Qube3 use a linux x86 2.2 but i does not have the sources available anymore when you do the automatic upgrade ( quite a nice feature anyway, as you do not have to care "much" about patching your linux ).
...
...
But unfortunatly, it does not have all the latest stuffs like ipv6
I was planing to upgrade it to some more up to date OS (linux 2.4 ? *bsd ? ) to get at least ipv6
My only constraint is that all my configuration use Java (a very little one ey !). As i run a, Tomcat & JBoss + a bunch of webapp that enable everything i need from file sharing, wiki, chat, email, etc.
could gigaQube be applied to Qube3 ? or is there a tested way to run an updated OS on this machine ?
Two words. The Source. Something like ten times hotter than Dave's.
And if you want to go straight into the gates of Hell, I believe that the current record holder is one called Caldera.
(Insert SCO joke here.)
I know someone who has a bottle - well, it's sort of three bottles really, and you can see tiny little crystals of (presumably) pure capsaicin suspended in the top one - and well, I wouldn't try it in a million years. It'd probably take the skin right off my tongue with one drop. I'd want a whole 8-way Opteron machine, or something in that spec, for eating that stuff.
The 866BASE gets a P3, 2 ethernet ports, and the usual interfaces on a 91mm x 96mm board.
Plenty of opportunities for packing a nice computer into a small case.
eh? Sun may have sold the Cobalt Qube, but it was a Linux based system. Why on earth would you want to put solaris on it?
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Yep, these things are definitely not the future by any means. These qubes with mips chips were actually the earlier ones, the later ones had k6's of some sort (and that was an improvement over the mips, AFAIK).
I used an IDE controller PCI card to get another available controller for the third drive.
Hmm... nice setup. I'd like to use my PCI slot for something else so I'm curious - why you didn't use 2 drives on one IDE channels? Was the performance sub-par? Also, I understand your data is striped across 3 drives, and you can afford to lose one - what RAID "version" is that? RAID 2?
Has anyone got an idea how to use 2 PCI cards with the Mini-ITX boards? The manual for the 533 Mhz Mini-ITX boards say it supports 2 PCI cards, even though it only has one PCI slot. The second card support is done using special pins on the motherboard, that the Via manual says require "proprietary" info from it to implement.
I love his choice of books, not to mention the bong.
gigaQube... when megaQube isn't enough.
Doing similtainous reads or writes to drives on the same channel really drops the performance levels.
RAID 5 is the setup he is most likely to be using.
PCI riser card maybe?
This is a small complaint about damned uninformed relatives that I HAVE to share with the world cos I want to scream
.ppt documents in my inbox. I rock up to his place and find out he's NOT actually forwarding on the same ppt file. He was:
An unnamed relative of mine... no fuck that it's my uncle kevin... had been sending me the same email over and over since july, when he got his first computer, and my cousin set it up for him. Turns out he thinks he was sending new emails to his family & friends. Nope, still the same junk forward, a powerpoint file called "Road rules for drunks" with some inane shit about road rules for driving if you're drunk, the kind of shit that the world forwards on the the rest of the world all the goddamned time. One after another, every week or so they'd appear.
Now I'm a helpful type, so I volunteered to fix this. More to the point I was sick of getting huge
1. opening an existing ppt file, the original "road rules for drunks" powerpoint document
2. creating a new page and typing his email in that, and inserting pictures if he wanted to send pictures
3. saving it
4. sending THAT newly edited file to about ten of us.
His inbox had loads of replies with "stop sending me this shit you've already sent it before!". admittedly most were mine.
Yes, the powerpoint document contained EVERY FUCKING EMAIL HE'D SENT AND EVERY PICTURE HE'D ATTACHED.
So, 2 hours of explaining later, I show him how to start off a brand new email. How to reply to emails. How to select relevant parts for quoting, how to email sensibly, lightly and properly in plain text. He gets it right, he sends emails, he attaches images, and seems to have picked it up quickly. I feel happy. I've solved a problem and grabbed a few free beers while at it
I go back home, and the very next day he sends me an email - a thank you note mentioning how grateful he was I helped him, and is embarassed he was doing it so stupidly before.
The kicker? He wrote it, again, in the powerpoint document. Road rules for drunks. at the end. and sent it to me as an attachment, a 7MB attachment.
I want to cry
But man check out that bong on the bottom shelf! When can we see that in action?
Offtopic? It's clearly in this picture... right next to the "Anarchist's Cookbook"
;)
Ack! A terrorist!
If you RTFA you would have noticed he is running a web server on the box here.
They also seem to have achieved 'fetish' status in Japan
:)
it's not that hard to get them hooked into funky stuff...have you seen those crazy TV shows and porn?
check out "the day i bought my roadster" photo album.. Spoiled litle brat is posing with his mother while she signs the cheque. Its nice having that cube today, but tomorrow when he's gotta make it on his own, I'll be the highest bidder for it on ebay when he's gotta pay the rent.
BTW kid, you look silly with those sunglasses, I know you're trying really hard to look cool but it just aint working.
Man, my girlfriend eats "prik kee nu," the hottest Thai chilis available as a condiment with her dinner. Even other Thais look at her with awe. Hot sauce my ass!
Put identity in the browser.
There are no others...no action once a woman gets a look at the contents of the bookshelves, hence "The Joy of Cybersex" seen on one of the shelves. Hell, even Vegas bachelor party shots didn't have any real action in them.
Shake it like a polaroid picture!
http://saveie6.com/
"Obviously you use Windows XP. Or maybe Mandrake."
I remember complains about people running Linux on the alpha. They recompile the kernel and everything turns dog slow. The reason being was that the compiled default redhat kernel was compilied using a special proprietary compiler.
NetBSD might not perform well if its compilied with gcc.
http://saveie6.com/
Thanks for the info Haakon.
About the PCI riser - thanks - I'd found nothing earlier, but I just googled again and found one - a special PCI riser that fits into one PCI slot, but runs two PCI cards simultaneously.
Slashdot is IT's McLaughlin Group, but there are 700,000 panelists.
WRONG!!!
Actually, he didn't use two drives on each IDE channel, because (AFAIK) the EPIAs only support one drive per channel on the integrated IDE controller.
What's it like when she licks your glans after a meal like that?
Is this a function of the board or the OS?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
same shit they were smoking when they bet a 120GB hard disk on a hot sauce eating contest.
I can't see why this is going to replace the mini-itx in any way.
I'm using my mini-itx as my home entertainment centre, and as such connect it to my TV and Stereo. It also serves as the home for my iPod and Digital camera. In addition, it's my local fileserver, firewall, web and mail-server. It's even my local wireless access-point. It's so feature-packed, that I've probably missed a dozen services.
Does the cube do half that? Didn't think so.
that's right, this stuff is unbreakable, wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions, & requires no 'BiG scIEnce' FUnDing.
'big science' will have to 'discover' it's conscience before it can tap into this stuff.
Two programs got the nod, so far. The top priority is planet/population rescue. Other goals mandated include the permanent disempowerment of unprecedented evile, & assurance that the planet/population is around to enjoy the gnu millennium of open/honest communications/commerce. Your grandchildren will survive to produce additional uses for the powers that are rescuing us from the greed/fear/ego based life0cide, as the lights come up...
consult with/trust in yOUR creator... get ready to see the light. there's never a cover charge/subscription fee. see you there? tell 'em robbIE?
this guy is using electrical tape to wire up his new PS to the old cobalt plug. how stupid is this guy? there are more safe and reliable ways to bring two pieces of wire together than that...5 minutes at home depot would tell you that.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Do you know where to buy their products without paying 3x as much for a single unit? I'd like to experiment with an ARMBASE.
what else could it be?
Please stop posting this smut at such a wee hour. I haven't finished breakfast -- my god, man, there are rules!
actually a better solution is from an article yesterday....
Put an ITX board in a Octane2 chassi.
you get the cool SGI case in a tiny server appliance form.
Much cheaper as O2 cases are $20-$40 on average.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...Borg style.
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Ahh, I would just love to get hold of one and paint it black and green.
Then I could say, "Use M$, and you will end up in that tiny cube! You will be assimulated!"
Ummmm - No. I don't know where you found that info, but it it not true for any model of epia. The controllers are fairly bog-standard via chips.
/shudder
The two drives are not mirrored...
It was more akin to having a more modern kernel, etc. that made the K6-II based Qube3's an improvement over the MIPS based Qube2. It was that you didn't have to compile special versions of things and that you had 2.4 versions of the kernel available that made the improvement. The Qube2's CPU was actually faster/cooler than the Qube3's offering- but the whole configuration wasn't largely utilizing the real power of the CPU in any of it's normal usages.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Cable Ties and an extra hard drive does not a case-mod make.
Modifying the power cable is a succesful mod, but interesting at all.
Slow day, slashdot eds?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Gets his bud from Tom Delay and Rumsfeld.
Karl Rove is in the business, but his is cut with parsley.
photosMy Photostream
There are two wildcards here:
1. The writer says he loaded a modified version of NetBSD. It is quite possible that this version hasn't the necessary components to run certain services. If you read the linked FAQ it also says there are restrictions on the kernel that can be loaded because the firmware expects to see certain partition and file attributes.
2. It is possible that the "special NetBSD installation process" makes it impossible to add additional services such as web and smtp.
Perhaps I should have pointed these things out in my original post, but maybe you could have simply RTFA.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
That has to be the nastiest splicing job I've ever seen. And what's with the gobby re-taping as well? Cripes man, get some heat shrink!
I used many back circa 1998- 2001. We loved them because they were easy to set-up and maintain with an excellent web-based interface and one-click software updates made the TCO of maintaining them extremely low despite their high initial cost. I've recently been shopping Ebay for a couple for general office servers to power our intranet (running phpProjeckt). However, getting one of those cubes would be cool for a generic file server...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Firstly, I fail to see how "certain partition and file attributes" restricts the addition of extra software. As I understand it, those restrictions are only present for the Qube firmware loading the kernel, which expects a Linux-based OS.
From the article, stats for file transfer using Samba are shown, so it's pretty obvious a working TCP/IP stack is present, therefore services providing HTTP and SMTP have everything they need to work.
And secondly, it's NetBSD! You have so many options to add these services, either by using pkgsrc or building them from scratch with the provided toolchain, however you like.
...and I upgraded them long ago, as he did (photos here). I don't understand why this is news: just replace the disk, add memory. Nothing else. Besides, NetBSD for Qube2 is available at www.netbsd.org, ready to install.
:-)
However, I agree that the Qubes are wonderful machines if you don't need raw CPU power. The ones I have are MMQUBE2s, the japanese version of the Qube3. They're great as file servers (one of them is my internal network's file server, using NFS and Samba), and another is a remote backup server for my FreeBSD boxes. They just suck 45Watt each, don't need a CPU fan (just a heat sink), and produce almost no sound. And they look cool.
My site
you could do this:
http://www.patrick.fm/boobies/
Props to the guy for still having his HP 200LX, which was a most excellent MS-DOS based palmtop PC back in the day.
sulli
RTFJ.
I have a Qube that just sits on a shelf, because it's such a drag to install an OS on it.
I can't get it to recognize any drive other than the one that it came with.
It has no IO other than the network and the drive controller.
Even if I could get the thing to boot, it apparently won't work with any kernel besides the 2.0.36 custom kernel that it came with.
There is a restore CD that you could get at one time, but you have to get the thing to boot via TFTP before you can even think about using the restore CD. Or else you have to format the drive a certain way with a certain version of ext2fs, and then un-rpm the restore stuff, which does not
appear to be complete. I'm not even sure you can still get the restore cd ISO's anywhere. The Qube archive has always looked like a patched-together, incomplete effort.
What's the "Special Sauce" RPM anyway?
You can hardly us any PCI devices at all. Most PCI ethernet cards won't even work. PCI video isn't possible either. Even if the bus could support it, there are power issues.
The MIPS chip on a Qube2 doesn't outperform a P-75. You are severely limited in your choice of RAM chips.
There is supposedly a BSD port for the box, but nobody on the cobalt list has ever reported much success with it. It's certainly not something you can do with a cookbook example.
So the Qube is enough of a pain, that I just keep it on a shelf. I'd maybe consider fitting an ITX board into it, but I don't want to mess up the toy value by cutting up the case.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'm interested in picking up a Qube, looks like an interesting project Wolf_m16@hotmail.com
Don't fret. Search around ebay for the Gateway Micro Server. Gateway sold a rebranded Qube2 for about a year or so. It's the same exact thing but in black. Good thing about them is that everyone looking for a Cobalt Qube aren't looking for the Micro Server, so you can usually find them cheap. (Got mine for half the cost of a Qube 2!)
why you didn't use 2 drives on one IDE channels?
0) IDE peformance sucks when two drives both want to use the same controller.
1) According to a Linux software RAID web page I read (but I'm not sure where; lost the URL so I can't tell you) when an IDE drive fails, it can confuse and hang the controller it's connected to. If you only have one drive per controller you don't care, but if you have two drives on one controller, one drive can fail and it can "take out" the other drive (at least untily you reboot to un-hang the controller). Since RAID can survive the loss of one drive, but not two, you really want just one IDE drive per controller.
Note that if you want to do SCSI RAID, you can just hang all the SCSI drives on one controller. But with IDE it's one controller, one drive.
I understand your data is striped across 3 drives, and you can afford to lose one - what RAID "version" is that?
RAID 5. If you connect N drives in RAID 5, you get N - 1 drives that can store data and 1 drive that's "wasted" to the redundancy. So my RAID 5 with three 120 GB drives has 240 GB of usable space, the same amount as the gigaQube.
You could always just use RAID 1, with two drives in a "mirror" (both drives kept in perfect sync). Then the single PCI slot will still be available.
You could even do something wacky like building a Linux software RAID that includes an external drive plugged in to one of the high-speed USB connectors, or one of the 1394 (FireWire) connectors. As long as Linux can recognize the device, you should be able to RAID it.
I seriously considered putting a stack of external boxes next to my server: Linux software RAID with hot-swap ability! But you pay a lot more for a 120 GB drive in an external enclosure than you pay for just a 120 GB drive, and each external enclosure will have a cooling fan and I didn't want the noise.
Good luck with your projects.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
*** "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden". -- Rosa Luxemburg ***
"Hello Slashdot! Due to the "effect" I am currently moving all shon.org content from the land-of-expensive-bandwidth to the Qube itself. We should be back up in about an hour." seriously... does he really think that there ol' box can handle the "effect"?
http://www.patrick.fm/boobies/boobies.php?text=han dybundler
http://saveie6.com/
Who needs a Cobalt Qube when the BTX form factor is coming out soon? (Link below for details)
From Anand's website form factors will start at 8.0" x 10.5" for the smaller boards (close enough).I wouldn't pay premium prices even just to have the case when commodity parts will soon be available to accomplish the same.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1876
I always like the Qube, for its small size, quietness, and design. But one thing has always been missing -- backup. The Qube Pro had dual drives that could be used for RAID mirroring, but that's not real backup IMO. And an external drive kind of defeats the whole purpose. What I'd like to see is a Qube-type thing with a tape drive. I've been tempted to go into the business of building them for years -- hey, if Cobalt could get *$2B* for their little company, maybe I could be a couple hundred thou...
What would be pretty cool would be if all you Slashdot fucktards would learn the differences between the words "then" and "than." Stupid cock-knockers. Go stick your illiterate heads in a fucking oven.
You need 1 redundacy drive per 4 storage drives, right? Not just n-1 redundany drive, else 1 redundacy drive would allow a drive to fail out of 10, which wouldn't work.
1. Hype cool web/file server.
2. Make a site about it including bong pictures.
3. Host the site on the tiny device itself.
4. Get Slashdot to incinerate it.
5. Profit???
I won the qube 3 pro from Cobalt (when it was still Cobalt) at the Quakecon 2001 convention in Mesquite. It came with 512mb, 2*40gig drives in raid 1, and 450Mhz. overall, not a bad little machine just to play around with.
Does the Cobalt Qube run WinNT/MIPS?
I enjoy hacking systems as much as the next guy, but when I can get something much better for much less and it's more reliable (no bubble wrap), I don't see the point.
So please, someone explain why the Qube is so great compared to Mini-ITX systems because I fail to see the advantages.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
i have been running my little raq2 for nearly 2 years now. its upgraded to 192mb ram and 30 gig hd and cookin better than ever!!! those little mipsel processors are just smoothe as butter and how much faster than a playstation do you really have to be to serve web pages anyway? ? ? ? hehe.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
1 redundancy drive per drive set. If you have 3 drives in the set, 2 hold data. If you have 4 drives in the set, 3 hold data. And so on. That's RAID 5.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
And it's nice, but not real fast. One of the things I like about it is that it's MIPS, not i386. I run NetBSD on it, so given the OS portability and the commitment to keeping it running on all sorts wacky (cobalt) hardware is nice. The other cool thing is that root-kits are unlikely to work against my wacky software running on wacky hardware. Sure, if there's a buffer overflow, someone can crash one of my servers, but unless the root kit is designed for MIPS (vs i386), it'll just be restarted by my daemontools setup.
So, as far as moving to mini-itx, I'd like the extra I/O, cheaper memory, faster processor, etc. But I'm not sure i want to be running a mainline processor (my other computers are Macs and NeXTs) for my firewall/server. Also, I like the idea that the Qube2 MB has two Ethernet on board so I don't need to worry about losing a slot just for that.
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Actually, the restore CD is bootable. Here's how it works:
y s.html, and scroll down the resulting page for "Sun Cobalt Server OS Restore Software". You likely will have to make a login at this point, but I see the Qube2 restore CD as a downloadable option (~120MB).
You take a seperate computer (from the Qube) that has a recognized network card (3com, Intel... the CD has this information when you boot), and you boot this computer with the restore CD. Connect the network card of this restore computer to the eth0 interface of the Qube (the interface with one dot) and power on the Qube.
Hold the "S" button on the Qube while it boots, and you will be able to select where to boot from (ROM, Net, or Disk). Choose boot from net, and it will use a Kernel in ROM to pull an install script and RPMs from the restore computer.
I don't work (and have never worked) for Cobalt (or Sun), but I do work with the Qube software on a near daily basis. For what it does, it's pretty amazing. They did a lot of improvements with the Qube3. They changed over to an x86 platform (AMD K6-350, so it's still not a powerhouse), and updated to the 2.2 kernel. Sausalito is fun to play with.
As for the OS restore CD, surf over to http://wwws.sun.com/software/download/operating_s
As I said, I am more familiar with the Qube3 OS (which I am trying to port to the Raq 550 for more power), but I'd be happy to answer any questions that I can.
"when an IDE drive fails, it can confuse and hang the controller"
Thanks steveha - i didn't know that.
Cheers
Sonam