Sun Opens Cobalt Code

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Friday January 2, 2004 @02:51AM from the users-not-blue-any-more dept.

Bush Kanaka writes "It looks like Sun has released the user interface and back-end custom code for the Cobalt Raq550 under a BSD-like licence. The BIOS code is also, apparently, now open source and is being maintained by Sun engineer Duncan Laurie in his own time. This has to be good news for all those Cobalt devotees who were annoyed when Sun killed off Cobalt last month, but is anybody going to actually pick up the software and start making their own Cobalt clones?"

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Previous article by vasqzr · 2004-01-02 02:53 · Score: 4, Informative

Previous article about Sun taking the Cobalts off the market.
Raq550 source code quality... by tcopeland · 2004-01-02 02:53 · Score: 4, Informative

...not too bad, some duplicates found by CPD.

--
The Army reading list
Re:Cobalt Cube? by AKnightCowboy · 2004-01-02 02:56 · Score: 5, Informative

Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back?
Umm, that's probably because it IS the same Cobalt that produced the Cube. Sun bought them several years ago (and subsequently killed them off by failing to release timely security patches or regular updates anymore). I've got several RaQ4r's and I should find out how this affects us when we keep them around to use as workgroup toy servers after we upgrade to general purpose Linux servers. They were great and I would keep using them if only Sun kept patches up to date. Oh well.
3 users? by vasqzr · 2004-01-02 02:56 · Score: 5, Informative

The number of sites on Cobalt has declined since August 2002, when it reached its peak of 3.1 million hostnames and 942K active sites. Our November hosting survey found Linux-Cobalt serving 871K hostnames and 527K active sites.

Percantage of Linux Active Sites with Known Linux Distribution:

Redhat 51.7% Cobalt 19.6% Debian 15.4% Suse 10.5% Mandrake 1.9% Gentoo 1.0%
From NetCraft
Re:Cobalt Cube? by vasqzr · 2004-01-02 02:59 · Score: 2, Informative

It's rack-mountable. So if you're a hosting company you can stick a ton of them in a small place. Hence the name 'RAQ'
Symantec by silconous · 2004-01-02 03:01 · Score: 5, Informative

Symantec will still develop it, all the Gateway Security firewalls and Raptor firewalls were built on cobalts
1. Re:Symantec by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-02 03:44 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Actually only the VelociRaptors were ever built on the Cobalts and not the main Raptor (now Symantec Enterprise Firewall) line. The V-Raps are being replaced with a new appliance in the very near future. I haven't had time to poke around on them yet but there is no guarantee that they will keep up the Cobalt code.
Cobalt Users Group by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-02 03:04 · Score: 5, Informative

http://open.cobaltqube.org/

Featuring Blue Quartz
Links would be nice. by kinema · 2004-01-02 03:13 · Score: 4, Informative

The Cobalt software can be found at: open.CobaltQube.org and the ROM can be found at SourceForge.
Re:Already? by NicolaiBSD · 2004-01-02 04:59 · Score: 3, Informative

They got chilisoft out of the aquisition of Cobalt. Chilisoft have coded an ASP engine for UNIX which Sun now sell as Sun Java System Active Server Pages 4.0.
New exploits? by MoogMan · 2004-01-02 07:18 · Score: 2, Informative

"is anybody going to actually pick up the software and start making their own Cobalt clones?"

Im not sure, but im sure that someone will be hunting through the sauce, searching for exploitable code...