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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."
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
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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...
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.
Obviously you don't use NetBSD. I have my primary mail/file/firewall/web/zope server at home running on a celeron 300a with 128M of ram, and it is zippy as can be.
I know this is the age of ever growing ram usage, but for a lot of things it isn't really needed. You can go a remarkably long way on 128M of ram. In fact, my machine never even swaps.
--wyn
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
Give us a link, we'll see how zippy it is.
ymmv
Yeah, I use OS X on my closet server. I guess I've gotten accustomed to needing a lot of RAM. I'm running my mp3s off of it, as well as usb printers and of course apache. However, 128 still seems like a small amount, especially for a server.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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.
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!
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.
No. As much as I hate earthlink, ... just no.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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."
Yes, more RAM is nice, but provided your OS doesn't take up most of it, you can do a fair bit in 128MB.
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?!
Hah. I watched that video - the bet was apparrently that he could not hold a tablespoon of some Extremely Hot Sauce in his mouth for two minutes without swallowing or barfing. Needless to say, he managed to do it. In style, I might add. Even went for Bonus Seconds. It looked like he got $100 cash out of the bet, too. That may have been how much the drive cost, though - I duno.
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.
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
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 watched it too, and I have a bottle of Dave's Loony Juice in my fridge downstairs. My eyes bugged out of my head when he poured an entire capful of it into his mouth. I bet he was paying for that for hours afterward.
You win again, gravity!
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.
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?
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!
Seriously. Hell, when I started out we didn't even have 1's and 0's... we just had 0's, and we liked it that way.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
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.
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.
> 128 MB is not enough to do anything useful.
One guess what operating system he uses.
Advanced users are users too!
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.
Is this a function of the board or the OS?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I had a server running on a Pentium 75Mhz 64MB with Freebsd, it was running Apache(with php), MySQL, Samba and 50gb disk. In the beginning, it only had 32mb and was slower but I found some memory and added another 32mb. It was even running one of those PHP bulletin boards. And I must admit it was not the fastest machine around but it served it's purpose for 3 years, serving the bulletin board for a small group(around 100) of people. With passive cpu cooling and a silent PSU it was great because it had to be located in my living room.
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.
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.
mail/file/firewall/web/zope
These are very non-demanding uninteresting tasks, though.
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.
I think the one from monarch would be better!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
With the possible exception of a DBMS, what "interesting task" were you planning on doing on a server?
........ you must love the sound of swapping
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?
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Gets his bud from Tom Delay and Rumsfeld.
Karl Rove is in the business, but his is cut with parsley.
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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=
BAH, I say, BAH! They need to do something where they take the computer, shove it into the monitor, and package it all into a little blob shape. That would be a winner!
Oh, wait a second...
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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.
The person who moderated this as interesting: can you pass me the bong?
Seriously, 'useful' is a useful term (pun intended) only when you know what the use is. In this case, a file server. I used to run a web server on an 8 MB 486 with Linux (later NetBSD) and I imagine a fileserver works better with a little more. And I'm constantly amazed by the memory requirements of Windows when I can do the same things with so much less in Linux.
(My laptop, which I use for must of my work, has 160 MB. My desktop has 320 MB which I think is a little overkill for my uses.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...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.
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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.
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 ***
http://www.patrick.fm/boobies/boobies.php?text=han dybundler
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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...
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???
Yes...gawd knows noone ever did anything useful with PDP-8s (~12KB), 8080/Z-80s (64KB), PDP-11s (256KB), IBM PCs (640KB), my first Sun (Sun 3/160, 16MB), my last VAX (the first gatech.edu (good lord all the things that it did), 128MB, as I recall), etc., etc.
So...run along back to Windows XP, or OSX, or RedHat 9 + KDE, or whatever bloated, alpha-channeled, transparent windowed, frilly-backgrounded, GL game-playing, purdy-piktured, GUI-fest you require to "do anything useful". Other folks have more apropos criteria for "useful".
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
Yeah, you only make that mistake once... or twice if you're as stupis as I am.
Put identity in the browser.
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