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Hardware Technology

Post Cobalt Alternatives? 68

Posted by Cliff from the RAQin'-em-up dept.
wizman asks: "I co-own a small ISP that does a bit of web hosting - probably less than 150 domains. We have been using the Cobalt RAQ product line ever since our beginnings. We are outgrowing our current RAQ and have been planning to purchase a newer one. However, it seems that ever since Sun purchased Cobalt, they have been moving away from the RAQ platform. Because of the incredible slowless in which Sun patches vulnerabilities (just now seeing a new SSH package) on top of a number of other annoyances, I am now seriously considering other options." Current RAQ sysadmins: what are your plans for the near future? What would you do if you owned Cobalt RAQs? Would they stay or would they go?

"Let's break this question into two parts:

a) What have customers been migrating to? I am really impressed with web://cp, and have also investigated Plesk, cPanel, and a few other commercial ones. Most of them require some specific version of Red Hat, which is slightly irritating. I have also considered stock Apache/qmail/vmailmgr/etc, but I'm looking for something that grants a bit more power and flexibility to my end users.

b) How was the migration? We have hundreds and hundreds of e-mail accounts, aliases, mailing lists, etc on our existing RAQ's, and would like the transition to be as seamless as possible. I am looking to finally get around the info@domain1,info@domain 2 issue. Users don't seem to grasp the concept of making an account without a generic name and aliasing info@ to it, so any experiences on this are more than welcome! Our staff is rather limited (I'm pretty much it tech-wise), so the smoother the better!

I am also open to arguments for keeping the RAQ line. I have read that they are open sourcing sausalito and cme, but it looks like there is no short-term stable release of this. I'm looking at a few weeks to a few months as a migration timeframe."
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Post Cobalt Alternatives? More

Post Cobalt Alternatives?

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  • I can't vouch for the migration abilities of Cpanel as I've never had to use them. I have almost 30 Plesk servers and I will say that as of their 6.0 version, IT SUCKS. Don't waste your money!

    Cpanel rocks, I am extremely pleased with it and I have 4 servers running it right now.

    FYI I host about 10,000 web sites at my data center, and have around 150 servers at last count. Some of those are dedicated server customers, who I also recommend Cpanel to.
    • I almost forgot, if you need first hand word about Cpanel and Plesk, feel free to email me r y a n @ r y a n f l o w e r s . c o m

      Fix the spacing in the email address.

      Take care

      Ryan
  • Have you tried webmin?

    It's a browser based control panel and runs on more than just redhat (I'm running it on yellowdog on ppc). It's also free (open source, I think.)
    • Webmin is nice, but only if you have local webmaster/web-admins. If you need to provide resellers with s control panel, tho, I guess you need to look elsewhere. I don't know what the security implications are in webmin... I seem to recall that it runs as root. Haven't used it in a while, tho.

    • Re:webmin (Score:2, Informative)

      by oneishy ( 669590 )

      I currently use both webmin, and a cobalt cube (on different servers).

      Webmin [webmin.com] is really good for the system admin stuff, and setting up new users etc... It also has good support for just about any version of linux, and application (ftp, apache, sendmail, qmail, etc...). I would not recommend using it for end user configuration as it grants a little to much power, and is geared towards the knowledgeable. It is however reliable and secure.

      For the end user, there is an addon to webmin called Usermin [webmin.com] and an

  • Upgrade to a modern distribution like debian (Score:5, Informative)

    by dotslash ( 12419 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:59PM (#7273631) Homepage
    I have upgraded all our RAQs to the newest debian (woody/stable) distribution. The RAQ can be firmware upgraded to support 2.4 kernels. Add to that a modern distribution and it becomes a pretty good server. As for the ssh patch: apt-get upgrade fixed that within an hour of the anouncement. Debian rules!

  • SunFire (Score:3, Informative)

    by CyberVenom ( 697959 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @03:00PM (#7273652)
    I have had a little experience with the early RAQ series from Cobalt, and personally I didn't like the setup very much. The management GUI was very nice, but most of the software and hardware was non-standard.
    I have used the SunFire V100, and have been very pleased with the results. I use the Debian distribution, which fully supports the SPARC architecture and for which patches are released promptly. The initial install was a little tricky, but far easier than installing Debian on a RAQ (which I did once too). Webmin can provide a nice interface for clients to configure things, and qmail/vpopmail/popauth/omail works well as an email solution.
    You can buy a new SunFire for less than $1000 too, which is a great price for an UltraSPARC in a 1U form factor.
    Some other interesting notes:
    I run software RAID1 across 2 IDE drives.
    I use the Tulip driver, not the Davicom driver.
    I used the Debian boot cd to load SILO, from which point I can load the kernel of my choosing.
    If anyoen wants, I may be able to dig up my notes on the exact install procedure I used for this machine.
    • SunFire V100

      The V120 is better if you need front-accessible drives. Just keep in mind that these things have 650MHz CPUs. Perfectly reasonable and low-power for general purpose work, just don't build a render farm out of them.
      • Keep in mind that this is a 650Mhz native-64-bit RISC CPU; it can hold its own against PIIIs and Athlons.
        The real competition will come as Opteron and Athlon64 go mainstream. Imagine trying to pack one of those and all of the needed cooling into a 1U though. :)
        I like RISC.
        • Too bad a Xeon with extra L3 cache beat the crap out of the 64 bit athlon chips!
          • Too bad a Xeon with extra L3 cache beat the crap out of the 64 bit athlon chips!

            Does that extra L3 cache cost more or less than a second Opteron chip? Does it cost more or less than an UltrasparcIII 1U server?

        • Re:SunFire (Score:3, Informative)

          by pmz ( 462998 )
          Keep in mind that this is a 650Mhz native-64-bit RISC CPU; it can hold its own against PIIIs and Athlons.

          This is only true for PIIIs under about 1GHz. I figured one time that the 400MHz UltraSPARC II CPUs compare to a 750MHz PIII in FP performance and to about a 450MHz PIII in integer (Spec95 numbers). Certainly a good general-purpose CPU with ECC RAM, etc., but not a computational powerhouse by modern standards.

          The Opteron is going to be a definite "if you can't beat'em join'em" CPU from Sun's point o
          • The integer comparison differs slightly depending on how much use the application makes of the 64-bit capabilities.
            Heat is another area of comparison; the UltraSPARC runs cold by today's standards. It uses passive cooling, and a rather sparse heat sink. I wonder what you could do if you managed to freon cool and overclock these chips?
            • Heat is another area of comparison; the UltraSPARC runs cold by today's standards.

              Absolutely true, which is a one advantage of SPARC and PPC chips that x86 fan-boys overlook a lot. Sun specs the 400MHz UltraSPARC II at a maximum of 19 watts. The UltraSPARC IIIi looks to be at 50 to 60 watts, and the UltraSPARC III Cu is, IIRC, in the 70 to 80 watt range.

              Compare to 100 watts and up for Intel's latest and greatest.

              Nearly all Sun workstations use the case fans to cool the CPUs, where there is no fan at a

              • BTW, I just saw this at Ace's Hardware: "The current 1.2 GHz 0.13 UltraSPARC III dissipates a peak of 53W." Not too bad.
                • Hmm, 30watt Opteron 240s will be sampling soon. They will go on sale in the new year.

                  Anyone claiming that UltraSparc is going to compete with PPC, Opteron and Itanium is out to lunch. These expensive CPUs have for a couple of years now have been slower than x86 processors in FP and Integer Calculations. They have been living on Solarius good name and popularity in the Oil industry as a database OS. If you don't believe me go look at the recent SPEC benchmarks, the sparcs stink.
              • What some SPARC fanboys overlook is if you run a decent x86 cpu at 400MHz it's not going to be putting out much more than 19 watts max either.

                Take a look at Intel too:
                ftp://download.intel.com/design/PentiumIII/ d atasht s/24526408.pdf
                At 19W you can have a 733MHz PIII.

                And this isn't even the low voltage notebook cpu or small micron stuff. This is the OLD stuff.

                A 733MHz PIII is faster or comparable to a 400MHz UltraSPARC II, and it was cheaper too.

                The new SPARCs run about as hot for the same performance. S

          • Re:SunFire (Score:3, Informative)

            by wizman ( 116087 )
            I appreciate everyone's input. However it seems most of the discussion so far has been hardware related. That end of things is fine - I have plenty of x86 boxen running Debian or FreeBSD. As the article mentions, I'm mainly looking for software solutions to provide our customers with a hosting control panel (Webmin is really not designed for this in a shared server environment) that will run on one of our existing platforms - Debian/x86 or FreeBSD/x86.
        • Hmm, we have no problem running a dual Opterons in a 1U case with 4 U320 SCSI drives.
  • You say you will listen to arguments to keep the RAQ, well why not? Is it broke? Then don't fix it.

  • hehe (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by kurosawdust ( 654754 )
    When I first read the headline, I thought it said "Post-COBOL Alternatives", then I thought "wow, this must be an article about everything..."

    The above is a joke. To both of the COBOL programmers reading slashdot, I offer you my sincerest condolences and ask you to not beat me with your wooden leg. Thank you.

    • Re:hehe (Score:3, Funny)

      by kalidasa ( 577403 ) *
      I learned COBOL in 1985. I then walked away from programming completely for 12 years. Yes, there is a causal relationship. It took me 12 years to recover.

  • As someone who's made the transition... (Score:5, Informative)

    by rute20740 ( 567763 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @03:36PM (#7274085) Homepage
    I migrated from a Cobalt RaQ setup after many many frustrating moments with the whole net appliance idea in general.

    I also needed the migration to be as smooth as possible, including all user auth, mail boxes/folders, lists and aliases.

    I decided to go with MySQL based authentication on Postfix, Courier-IMAP, Apache, and ProFTPd, all running on Debian. I Wrote a little web front end using PHP for user administration, and voila, we now have a much more flexible system. All MySQL auth patches and plugins are available in Debian's apt archive.

    Check out how-tos on the subject here [demon.co.uk], here [insanegenius.net], and here [diegonet.com].

    It took a little effort to get all of this working, but a little effort went a long way. I was basically able to duplicate the RaQ's functionality on a Debian system that I had full control over as far as software updates, kernel and hardware.

    To top it all off, I replicated the config and used Heartbeat [linux-ha.org] to make this into a high availability pair.

  • ISP Solutions (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lando ( 9348 ) <lando2+slashNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @03:43PM (#7274171) Homepage Journal
    Working with a number of ISP's, ie running one myself in the past. I would recommend going with C-panel... The system works well and is updated quite often.

    Rolling your own distribution and keeping apache/postfix/frontpage extentions/webmin/etc up to date takes more time than it's worth and eats your profit margin up.

    Depending on the space you have available, I would go with some 1u or 2u units. Frankly with 150 domains you can probably run all of them on 1-2 systems with decent hardware.

    I strongly recommend against plesk, as they have a number of issues or have had in the past.
    • I wouldn't recommend cPanel unless you want to pay for all those lovely spelling errors like "automagicly" and "editted". Seriously, the cPanel developers are worse than the Slashdot admins, and that's saying a lot. I can't believe they expect you to pay so much for their software ($42.50/month/per server for a minimum of 10 licenses?)

      While we run cPanel on a few of our servers, I can't say I would recommend use of their system. The hideous spelling errors, plus the fact that updates come out almost daily

  • You could use Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, whatever. You could even use something like ASP-Linux [asp-linux.com] which is designed for ASPs/ISPs but I haven't used it. We use standard Linux Distros with Webmin which someone else recommended. The are various control panels available off of the Webmin site [webmin.com] like Virtualmin and ISP4You.

    Then you can use commodity 1U chassis for substantially less than big names. Sticking with reliable components with give you inexpensive machines that will last a long long time. Before someone

  • I was hosting at couple domains a work with a RAQ4. While waiting for updates to ssh to become available it got hit with a exploit known as "raq f***". I decided to never run on a box that I couldn't patch to my hearts content again. I switched over to a Sun Nextra X1 running Solaris 9. Everything from Apache to MySQL to Courier IMAP and Postfix is custom compiled and configured by hand. My opinion is that a graphical front end is nice but if you admin more then a couple of domains then you should know how
  • Patched much more frequently.
  • While this doesn't solve the long-term problem, you can get alot of useful updates from:

    http://www.pkgmaster.com/

    It's run by Taco (but not CmdrTaco) and he used to work for Cobalt (as did I). He releases lots of goodies and things like OpenSSH faster than Sun ever did.

    Also ... someone could resurrect the RaQs if they wanted to as Sun has open sourced the code for the Qube 3 at:

    http://open.cobaltqube.org/

    While the Qube didn't have the RaQ's virtual hosting, it wouldn't be a massive stretch to extend the
  • for the MIPS-equipped cobalt machines, there is NetBSD/cobalt. Get the latest release, NetBSD 1.6.1 [netbsd.org] and also have a look at the mailing list archive [netbsd.org].

    Some data about stability:

    raqim% uname -rsm
    NetBSD 1.5.1 cobalt
    raqim% uptime
    11:40PM up 25 days, 21:35, 11 users, load averages: 0.46, 0.30, 0.23

    - Hubert

  • I'm not sure of the Raq attraction anymore. I've never owned one. But from what I read they are cheap, but underpowered.

    Nowadays you can get cheap _and_ powerful dedicated servers. Linux to boot.

    Control panel wise, if you want to go the Open Source route, slap something like Webmin [webmin.com] on them with VirtualMin [webmin.com] if you are planning on reselling the space and will have third party users needing a control panel.

    Otherwise the most popular web hosting control panels are the likes of Ensim, Plesk and cPanel/WH

  • We had about 15 assorted raq, raq2's, and raq3's that were serving email, web, and some ftp sites. Since sun appeared to have no intention of putting out patches for the various vulnerabilities in both ssh and the httpd services on the boxes, we had to look at other options. Getting one of the newer cobalts wasn't appealling since a company that does this once, is just going to do it again, when they decide they don't want to support the newest.

    We ended up converting all our mail off onto an Imail setup

  • ISPMan? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Rheingold ( 2741 )

    I've never used the RaQs, but I run my ISP using ISPMan [sf.net]. It's a pretty good system that uses the components I like: Postfix, Cyrus, Apache, Pure-FTPD and LDAP.

  • I wouldn't really recommend using web://cp.. unless it has changed much in the last few months.

    For a start, the webcp daemon seems to die ALL the time for no apparent reason. We've had to do a lot of work changing poorly-written code.. it's quite a hassle to get it all up and running properly. It's not too bad once you get it going however.

    Though I imagine other web control panel software are still better than webcp.
  • We use cPanel on all of our shared Webhosting machines - and a large percentage of our dedicated server and colocation customers choose to use it too.

    cPanel runs on RH7.3-RH9, FreeBSD, Mandrake, and SuSE. You're not limited to a single RH version there. :)
  • Personally, I like CPANEL. I've used it across three different hosting providers and now I offer it on my own as an e-commerce focused webhosting provider (not the URL in my SIG).

    It works well, only breaks occasionally (this is all still bleeding edge and this comes with the territory -- if your clients aren't doing advanced stuff, you can afford to update CPANEL less often -- your choice), and that usually gets updated pretty quickly. Customers like it because it's very easy to use, and there are a number
  • According to my Periodic Table, after Cobalt comes Nickel.
  • Cobalt RaQs make good honeypots. I know because I have one. Mirror a few websites from the net, set them up in their virtual servers, apply some fake logs and some email/ftp activity, and it looks just like a badly managed virtual web server at a small ISP.

    I have used other honeypots, honeyd, vmware with varying results. Most hackers are aware of honeypots nowadays and the first thing they do when they get in is to check to see if it is a honeypot. According to their actions, they are getting paranoid.
  • I used to work at Cobalt -- we basically saw the writing on the wall two years ago when Sun decided to let go of pretty much everyone working in their "Server Appliance Business Unit".

    We [simpli.biz] currently have 12 Cobalt RaQ servers. We haven't bought any new ones recently; we leased out the ones we had and moved on to cPanel, Ensim, and DirectAdmin.

    Of the three control panels we've used, I'd recommend Ensim. They have a RaQ migration script that lets you migrate as many domains as you want painlessly. The script
  • All I can say is avoid CPanel like the plague. I previously admined Raq's from RaQ 3's to RaQ XTR's, all I can say is I love them, for their relative simplicity, you don't give end users 10 ways to do the same thing, it only end up confusing them more. Raq's were simplistic, and most everyone could figure the GUI out. CPanel suffers from creeping featuritus, and the desire to add more features rather than fix bugs and produce a stable release. And have you ever actually looked at some of the CPanel code

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