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Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#21

Post by mysterydip »

rcarmo wrote: post #11

I ran several RaQ3s at an ISP, and had a Qube 3 for a while ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16490971544/in/album-... ). I loved the things and did several backports of RHEL stuff to run on the Intel variants. When they were discontinued, I was allowed to take some of them home. Had to give them up, though, because I lacked the room to keep the boxes around, and at the time I also lacked the time to maintain…

Thanks for unlocking a memory for me. I used to drool over that hardware, not even for the specs but just how cool it looked. I'm sure it's prohibitively expensive but maybe I'll find a good deal on ebay.

Edit: found this company that retrofits them into a NAS and I'm really tempted to get one: https://mycherrytree.com/products/cherrynas-cobalt-qube

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#22

Post by johnklos »

These machines have several things that we don't see much these days: "Made in USA", which the author mentions, a CPU that takes so little power that it doesn't require a heat sink, and a low power design that means the whole system doesn't even need a fan at all. Some have fans, and some come without fans.

The hardware is incredibly reliable. I've been running one RaQ for two decades now, and it has compiled continuously for years. It compiles all of the NetBSD binary packages for mipsel found here:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/mipsel/9.0...

Another RaQ had a power supply that failed. I took a power supply from an old external drive enclosure, connected +5 and +12 volts, and everything worked. It's amazing how much can be done with so little power.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#23

Post by IntelMiner »

RedShift1 wrote: post #5

I still have a perfectly working Cobalt Raq 550 sitting in my closet... Pentium III 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM. Don't know what to do with it. It's also extremely noisy so can't use it as a server or router at home.

Depending on your location, a lot of retro computing hobbyists would be interested in it if you were up for parting with such a machine

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#24

Post by IntelMiner »

I picked up a RaQ 3 some time ago after haggling an eBay seller down to about $40. I was intending to run Windows NT 4 on it for some very legacy devices in my retro lab. But I hadn't got around to it yet

Wonder if it's still possible to upgrade it to an AMD K6-III as well

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#25

Post by tbcj »

I both love these and hated them. At The Planet (before the Softlayer founders left) we had a wall of these that were so neat to look at. My 16 year old self thought they must be the best.

These things taught me that a web based control panel is hard to do right. We had so many that I often needed to do something and used the web UI at first. That didn’t last.

The Planet was generous and let me rack one for myself but I ditched it for an old 2u running Solaris not long after.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#26

Post by bluedino »

A friend and I worked at a mini ISP of sorts, a customer had one but upgraded to something else so they just said we could have it.

I wasn't there that day so he got to take it home. He kept it on a shelf on his desk, and he would run his php code on it, it was such a cool little setup at the time.

I ended up eventually getting a retired RedRak from another customer, so I wasn't jealous anymore.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#27

Post by mmastrac »

johnklos wrote: post #22

These machines have several things that we don't see much these days: "Made in USA", which the author mentions, a CPU that takes so little power that it doesn't require a heat sink, and a low power design that means the whole system doesn't even need a fan at all. Some have fans, and some come without fans. The hardware is incredibly reliable. I've been running one RaQ for two decades now, and it has compiled continu…

As a curiousity - would running qemu-mips on a modern system be faster/more efficient?

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#28

Post by betaby »

mmastrac wrote: post #27
johnklos wrote: post #22

These machines have several things that we don't see much these days: "Made in USA", which the author mentions, a CPU that takes so little power that it doesn't require a heat sink, and a low power design that means the whole system doesn't even need a fan at all. Some have fans, and some come without fans. The hardware is incredibly reliable. I've been running one RaQ for two decades now, and it has compiled continu…

As a curiousity - would running qemu-mips on a modern system be faster/more efficient?

I was using qemu-mips quite often around 2012. It was definitely faster, probably more power efficient too.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#29

Post by ericabiz »

As a former Cobalt employee, it made my day to see someone resurrecting old RaQs! What a fantastic piece of equipment for its time. I worked there in 1999 through the Sun acquisition and then at Sun for a little while before I started my own business—a web hosting company, started with a glorious rack of RaQs, of course. :)
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