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Sun Opens Cobalt Code
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?"
Previous article about Sun taking the Cobalts off the market.
...not too bad, some duplicates found by CPD.
The Army reading list
Was I the only one who accidentally read, "Sun opens Cobol Code," and thought, "Egads, some things just need to stay closed-source" ?
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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.
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
I've got a three-system (used) computer rack that cost in total around $350. It helps to know somebody in the computer department of a large business when it comes time for them to unload their stock, especially when the alternative is for them to pay to dump the stuff.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The hardware on the other hand was really shitty and ended failing no matter what version cobalt raq/qube you had. I have a cobalt raq that doesn't work and also a cobalt qube 3 that has some misc. hardware issue. I hope someone can work the source and make a good UI for a generic platform.
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 will still develop it, all the Gateway Security firewalls and Raptor firewalls were built on cobalts
http://open.cobaltqube.org/
Featuring Blue Quartz
Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back?
This is the first first post I've seen that was dumber than a "First post!" first post.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Sun has not owned Cobalt for a very long time IIRC. Do they still have anything substantial they got out of the purchase, or was the whole this money down the drain at this point?
Did they need to purchase Cobalt to "get their heads around" Linux? Did they need Cobalt to figure out how to make a low end Intel server? Maybe Sun has less between their ears than I gave them credit for, but I don't believe either is the case.
Seems like a bad business decision to purchase them to me, but maybe I'm missing something.
Soccer Goal Plans
The Cobalt software can be found at: open.CobaltQube.org and the ROM can be found at SourceForge.
This gesture is far more useful to those who are "stuck" with an end-of-lined server. If there are flaws with the software (and with Raqs, there are always a few that creep out over time), the admins can do the fixes themselves.
I really doubt that anyone is going to use the Raq software to start a new project when there are cheap, well-exercised alternatives on the market.
Thus inviting disaster to my oh-so-dainty home DSL line, I nevertheless boldly post a link to a set of humorous uses for a dead Cobalt Cube. These pictures were done by a former coworker of mine, Scott Lundberg (Hi Scott!) about four years ago.
http://www.mbuf.com/deadcube.php
In a related rant, to heck with the upper level source code. I want them to release the schematics, BIOS, and boot code for the ARM cube! Having a turnkey ARM system like that would be an incredible boon to the embedded Linux world. Open Source doesn't necessarily have to mean just source code, IMO.
Has anyone made an "Internet Appliance" to replace the Cobalt RAQ line? Although the RAQ line was not perfect, it's ease of use was unmatched.
That's pretty cool, I guess we'll see a slew of userfriendly server distros based around that... And dedicated server companies installing them on cheap hardware instead of the non-free alternatives!
Gotta admit that it's pretty nice for a company to open-source what they will not use for profit anymore..
First, those of us who rely on Cobalt appliances will stand a better chance of finding useful updates and peer support as no doubt from the existing Cobalt users communities a thriving community will appear around this project. I have spoken in the past about Sun's lacklustre approach to providing software updates for these boxes so from there any progress can only be an improvement.
Second, the Cobalt www based admin software is not that bad. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's quite good. It allows people who would normally have no idea to administer a www connected server appliance and having at times seen some of the competing commercial offerings I'd say it does that job well and I'll certainly spend some time poking around inside it. To have this project in the public domain as open source can only be of benefit to the open source world as a whole.
I await with interest further developments upon this piece of software.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Aside from Genome integration, Solaris userland has been static for many, many years (far too long IMHO - Sun relies upon sunfreeware.com far too much).
Why would the Cobalt code not be useful as part of the base install?
Actually, what I'd like to see is Sun pick the best GNU distribution and wrap the Solaris kernel and libc around it. Sun releasing GNU/Solaris would prove that there is life in the old girl yet.
They should open their eyes and realize how valuable the cobalt line was to the market it served and how that market is coming right back again in the form of consumer level servers. Consumers are gathering large amounts of content (mp3s, movies, photo albums, etc) and they are starting to want to host this content - THEMSELVES! This is a nice market for low cost, quiet, easy to manage servers. The average consumer doesn't want to administer Linux, the want to administer something along the lines of a Cobalt server (or easier).
Sun once again pisses away an opportunity because they can't see the forest for the trees.
I use to work at a small company (about 6 full staff) which used an old Qube 2 box for distributing email around the office. Although restrictve and sometimes basic customisation required diving into the horrible world of 70's style telnet-based command line editing. Despite this, I thought the web-based administration system used was amazing.
No mucking about, simply point web-browser at the Qube, type in user-name and password and then a few simple web-pages allowed common adiministration tasks to be performed by the most unskilled of 16 year old work experience kids.
I always thought this provided the ideal interface for computer/network-controlled home appliances. Personally I'd find it really useful to log into my house from work and make sure lights are switched off (or switched on before I arrive home), pre-heat oven, turn hot water on etc.
Surely such control is already technoloically viable using simply a qube style interface, an always-on home internet connection and a computer linked into lighting/kitchen systems (for examples above).
Does anyone know of any projects/progress for this sort of thing?
Webmin is good for server administration (it's what I use when I don't feel like ssh), and it has an offshoot, Usermin, for users to manage their accounts and such. There's also Virtualmin, another offshoot (that's ransomware, though), that gives more of what you might be looking for, such as the ability for users to manage their VirtualHost site in Apache, a MySQL table, etc. I never really used any of the RaQ/Cobalt code, though, so I couldn't begin to guess how it compares.
The seeminly-ubiquitous web panel for servers is CPanel, but that's not free. (They do give it out free to academic institutions; I'm not sure about non-profits, though. Worth a look, though; I love CPanel.)
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suwain_2
I am not sure if you have checked out Webmin before, but it is a great control panel and can be made to have more granular and domain specific controls for users. With a tiny bit of effort in setting up each user as opposed to the RAQ interface, Webmin is a great solution. Personally there were so many little things that irritated me with the RAQ interface that the nice features could not make up for...but this is only opinion.
I know at least one of their servers (RAQ XTR) is x86 based. Besides, most of the frontend code appears to be scripting code or otherwise cpu-independent, so a recompile should solve that problem. Hopefully this will result in code for generic Linux/BSD machines.
A big wish of mine is for the Cobalt web/mail admin code to find its way as a plugin for the very excellent Webmin project. Webmin has a web frontend like Cobalt which covers lots of other functionality, but generally it tends to be thin wrapper around the config files. The cobalt GUI abstracts things quite a bit more for new users and for basic tasks, and Webmin would benefit from this.
Also of course, the cobalt rom is immensely useful, since that's how you load your kernel which loads your kernel :) It might be best to just put your actual kernel into the flash, though I've heard of people having had cobalts so long the flash has gone bad or something, and the system dies permanently when they try to update the rom.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
is anyody going to actually pick up the software and start making their own Cobalt clones
It doesn't matter. If nobody does, then Sun was justified in killing it off. If people do, then Sun should be congradulated on doing the right thing.
This makes me feel a lot better about using Sun technologies. I know they have a tight control on Java now in order to make sure it does fly out of control as some people beleive happened to C++. This makes me feel that if Java does become legacy and unsupported, that the systems I'm building now with have another avenue of support.
-no broken link
Ooh I finally got through. Here's a mirror of the BlueQuartz installer for RedHat 9.
"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...
I know a number of small local ISP's that used them for the same reason and many are dumping them dirt cheap and we are purchasing what we can afford, keeping some for parts, and coloing others, and using some for in house application development.
At least when Sun's products at EOL they release the code, unlike some other companies who's idea it is, sorry WIn..I mean Product X is now no longer supported: please spend more money to upgrade now!
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.