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Cobalt Networks CobaltOS: Proxmox Port (archive.org)

26 points by CursedSilicon ↗ HN
Cobalt Networks “RaQ” and “Qube” products were rather popular with ISP’s, web hosting companies and small/medium businesses in the 90’s and 2000’s. Their operating system media was preserved via the Internet Archive but getting it running on regular hardware is an extremely difficult task as the OS was never released for installation on 3rd-party hardware.

Retro computing youtuber “The Phintage Collector” ported it to Virtualbox a while back during an attempt to ressurect their “RaQ3” server. This is an extension of his work to bring it to a more “proper” hypervisor as part of an upcoming retro computing project.

8 comments

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leejoramo
I ran a single Cobolt RaQ for years for a client. I think it was the RaQ 2. It was dedicated hosted at RackSpace back in the late 90s to about 2002

At the time, RackSpace was an excellent customer service company even for smaller accounts. To this day it was the best customer service I ever worked with.

When I decommissioned the RaQ, my RackSpace rep called me and asked if they could ship the system to me. Apparently, it was the last Colbalt system they had running by years.

CursedSilicon
Cobalt Networks was insanely popular in the web space, as far as I can tell it might have also been the first widespread "Linux appliance" (though a FreeBSD based one beat it to market in 1996 though was far less popular)

In hindsight it's any wonder Sun bought and trashed them. Cheap MIPS (later x86) web boxes running Linux probably absolutely ate into their margins in certain markets

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upbeatlinux
This takes me back to 2004 when I inherited a NasRaQ, the original company file server, which had been replaced by a Windows Server 2000/2003 a few years prior. It became my go-to storage for Ghost and ISO images until the company gifted it to me around 2009. I may have had to replace one of the two drives while it was in service, but it was a rock-solid machine! Finally sold it on Craigslist in 2011, but I’m pretty sure it would’ve kept on trucking. Would've loved to try this out!"
CursedSilicon
If you've got a machine running Proxmox you can throw the VM right in and boot it! It should enable all the required settings automatically and let you log in with the default admin/admin credentials
rcarmo
This is great fun. I had a Qube on my desk for a long time, and we had RaQ3 running for many, many years. They were great little machines.
lukeh
Sun paid an absolutely fortune for Cobalt if I remember right!