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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.
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...
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
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 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
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!
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?!
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.
But man check out that bong on the bottom shelf! When can we see that in action?
http://www.lex.com.tw/index1.htm They make nice powersupplies. No fan, just 12v -> atx adapters. They require a 12 volt AC/DC adapter. No Fans, no noise.
The mini-itx boards can be passively cooled. The 533 mhz version is. Some special cases use heatpipes. Then the only noise is the harddisk (if you need one, booting via the ethernet adapter is also an option!)
---
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
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
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