Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

oldvcr.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#31

Post by brucetim »

ericabiz wrote: post #29

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. :)

Hi Erica! I was there as a Sales Engineer serving the southwest region around the same time you were there too (2000-2002), based in San Diego. I wish I had kept the RaQ and Qube units I had at home (I had pretty much one of everything from Qube2 through RaQ 550).

Cobalt was an awesome place to work and had amazingly skilled employees. Too bad the Sun acquisition was the death knell for the products...

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#32

Post by johnklos »

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?

Probably. As a general rule, though, we use actual hardware where possible. There have been differences between real hardware and emulated machines, such as floating point issues with m68k in qemu, for instance.

At some point, though, some of these kinds of builds will move to qemu and friends.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#33

Post by cy384 »

mysterydip wrote: post #21
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

I was looking at my qube 3 this morning and thinking I should sell it; I never got around to hacking it up as a compact PC case

send me an email (this username at cy384.com) if you're interested!

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#34

Post by marklyon »

I had a pair of these for doing webhosting back in the day. I'd colo'd them at a sublet space in a New Orleans data center. Reliability got really spotty at one point - turns out the guy I rented the Us from had failed to pay his bill. We got kicked out and he took all the equipment (about 3 full racks) and piled it into his car. He then took it to his pool house where he'd had a T1 line dropped in. He owned the IP block, so they didn't need to re-address anything. I only found out why things were so slow when I demanded to come get my hardware.

Sadly, not my worst colo experience. That went to a Texas-based, name brand "dedicated server" operation who had a secondary site in Chicago. I bought a server there solely for offsite backups; it was plagued with issues. Turns out, the data center was the scene of constant theft - by the employees. It came to a head one night when off-the-clock employees injured the on-duty employee, cut a hole in the wall, and then made off with all sorts of networking and computing gear. The company lied for months, held data hostage, and kept money for services they didn't provide. I think Chris Faulkner is still in jail now, so he can't make good on his threats to sue me now. Dude got really pissed when customers told the truth on Web Hosting Talk. I hope he enjoys every last minute at FCI LOMPOC.

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#35

Post by wildbill »

Talk about a weird internet moment. I see this listed on HN this morning as I'm doing the morning routine and I didn't even look at the link, I just clicked on it thinking "I used to have a RaQ2..." click

As I read the article, I realized I was on Cameron's site and that this particular RaQ2 used to be in _my_ garage. (Hey, I'm slow in the mornings since I cut out caffeine.)

Super cool to see it still in operation, and always dig reading Cameron's latest adventures in old hardware. :)

Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2

#36

Post by serialport »

IntelMiner wrote: post #24

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

While the RaQ 3 had an x86 cpu, it doesn't have a normal PC bios. completely custom board and firmware made for booting a linux kernel which I think would be very-challenging near impossible to boot Windows on.
Post reply on HN