This Web Server Changed The Internet: The Cobalt RaQ
Вставка
- Опубліковано 9 тра 2024
- Come along as we take a journey back to 1998 to learn about a small company called Cobalt Networks that changed the Internet as we knew it.
Part 2 - • Restoring the Web Serv...
Support our channel! Patreon + Discord community: / serialport
00:00 - 1998
01:11 - Cobalt Networks
02:22 - Company beginnings
02:32 - Qube 2700
03:38 - RaQ server appliance
04:42 - Acquisition by Sun Microsystems
05:02 - Cobalt's legacy
05:24 - Cobalt RaQ 3
06:06 - First boot
07:14 - Hardware overview
08:55 - Second RaQ boot
11:02 - Second RaQ hardware
11:32 - Future plans
11:51 - Outro
#90s #server #internet
I had one of these as a teenager. I used an ISP called ZEN who provided a static IP address with their broadband. I used the static IP to host multiple websites that I designed for customers. I ran this thing from the airing cupboard of my bedroom with an APC UPS. It earned me quite a few hundred pounds every year in hosting fees! 😊 I must check in my mum’s loft to see if it is still hiding there as I don’t think I ever sold it.
Lol.... Still remember my first website too. And the e-commerce shop that I tried to help build.
This is an interesting... Video... Because it basically means that, these mom and pops ISP then rolled over into the likes of Facebook's and things rolled up.... What was so stable is now not so stable.
@@MeiinUKdont you mean the likes of AT&T, T-Mobile and such because Facebook is a different kind of hemorrhoid than an ISP
@@seansingh4421 Actually you'd be surprised how connected and rooted Facebook was/is on the internet. It started it only for Harvard students, using Harvards network which at the time compared to other networks was pretty vast. Harvard contributed a lot. Hell Facebook has its own ASN and peers with other ISPs. They help support and provide service to the internet.
I used mine to serve porn too
Believe it or not, I turned off the last bunch of them only in January 2020, together with a bunch of HP NetServers, all from the 90's. These boxes were indestructable and indeed, together with the Cisco 7200 and 10k series routers, were the buildingblocks of the internet. There are many 7200's out there as well, still!
The company I work for has routers of that 2006 vintage still :)
They probably required newer software to run HTTPS, or was that why SSL accelerator units existed?
@@soundspark Reverse proxies probably
@@MrOpenGL Which were sold as appliances too back in the day.
This was from the era when the US Government was still restricting the export of strong encryption, which meant crippled SSL certs.
So a savvy guy named Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa decided to set up his own CA and issue full-strength certs outside the control of the US Government. My main client here in NZ at the time got certs from him.
Blast from the past!! I thought you might get a kick out of knowing that this video is making the rounds among the old Cobalt engineering team. :)
As for the mobo - it was designed in-house. :)
Quick question from someone who doesn't know anywhere near as much as you...
Were capacitors seen as the best solution back then? Was it known that they would fail in the way they do over time?
@@SiikProsNot sure if you left out a word but all motherboards have capacitors. They are needed for filtering and buffering the electrical demands of the chips in the system. You can't design a motherboard without them. Based on the time frame, the bad capacitor issues would have just started to become a known issue.
@@PedroDaGr8 I must look into capacitors then because my understanding of their function in motherboards seems to be off. I thought they had to do with managing power within the board to the different components.
@@PedroDaGr8 thank you for answering
Sounds like you might be confused with the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module)
These things were known as 'Pizza box' servers due to their formfactor. I remember going into datacentres in London's docklands and just seeing rack after rack after rack of them.
Telehouse North ? or where? :)
@@theserialport Redbus facilities like Soverign House and Meridian gate.
@@theserialporti saw them in THN
Same here, they were all over the place in the old redbus Hex 6-7 facility. I had to decommission three racks of these damn things back in 2007. They were being given away to staff for free at one point, presumably because it was cheaper than using e-waste suppliers.
"Were"? 1U servers are still known as pizza boxes.
And there are still lots of data centers full of 1U servers, although obviously not from the Cobalt brand anymore.
Nothing beats the 90's - early 2000's translucent casing looks.
I wish there was more of that nowadays too.
Seconded - translucent plastic casings look amazing.
...Imagine being one of the overpaid financial "gurus" who insisted that the internet would never matter to business and just was a passing fad, though.
@@werdfeefs7027Knowing those kinds of people they are probably still trying to defend that position
After Sun dropped the Cobalt RAQ platform, Project Blue Quartz was developed, which was an open-source version of the Cobalt RAQ software. It could be run on any modern server, or as a VM and was eventually ported to CentOS 5. Later on, the Blue Quartz software was ported to Project BlueOnyx, which is still active and downloadable today.
Yea blue Quartz.
Yes, BlueOnyx is still around. I used their software for a long time before I took the leap to cloud based services. I'm still on their mailing lists though, and it's still under active development. Strongly encourage people to check it out. (And they could use donations right now as well.)
I remember wanting a cobalt appliance to mess around with as a kid but could never afford one. Always wanted to host my own website.
I did for a while until the cable company sent my parents a cease and desist about running a web server on our cable modem 😂
When I was in High school I started a hosting company and we thought we were hot shit because we got one of those Cisco Blue Pizza Boxes as a dedicated server when they were all the rage.
Was it in the States? Idk, I'm literally torrenting and seeding terrabytes over here in Canada and nobody gives a hoot.
@@harryshuman9637 sounds like this was early 2000s rather than current day, totally different worlds
Pirate software :)
@@redhel Idk, ISPs can still prevent running servers from private IPs.
I love the status messages the programmers in to describe various tasks. "BOOTLOADER: Leap of faith!"
It could be something as simple-seeming as jumping to the next instruction, but with a different processor mode (e.g. virtual memory mapping) enabled. That requires all kinds of things to be set up properly--not just the page tables, but also proper flushing of processor caches to avoid picking up now-incorrect addresses. So when you get there, you can quite rightly say “Phew!”.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Thanks for explaining that, I was curious specifically what it was. Knew it was a "big jmp" of some kind, but that definitely explains why it was so notable as to have it's own log entry!
Guys, you'd better avoid ultrasonic cleaning of boards with crystal oscillators, because they may be irreparably damaged by the vibration. De-solder crystals from PCB or at least don't immerse them in the cleaning liquid. And the second advice I'd like to mention, in my opinion the best way of de-soldering components, such as the capacitors, is as following: apply a bit of tacky solder flux, then heat the junction adding some fresh conventional soldering alloy (not a lead-free one), then hold your soldering iron with one hand to keep the solder melted, while very gently pulling and wiggling the component by the other hand. In your case, as a capacitor has only two legs, it's in fact possible to keep both hot and melted simultaneously, by constantly moving solder iron tip from one to another, back and forth (remember, your other hand is cautiously swaying the component at the same time). It sounds more complicated than it works, although you'll need a little bit of practice, preferably on some dead board. The key to success is tacky flux and free solder alloy. Next, in my opinion, round solder tips are not very handy. Give a try to chisel (D-shape), knife (K-shape) or bevel (C-shape). BTW, with a wide solder tip, like Hakko T12-WD52 or T12-K for example, you can heat a number of legs at the same time without moving the solder iron.
Thanks for the video, you're doing great!
I so remember these, the ISP/MSP I worked for developed an inhouse board that allowed two drives to get crammed in the case and use software to mirror them. There was a VERY specific method to properly fold the IDE cables to get the thing closed up. Ran a modified version of the RaQ OS, also tweaked in house if my memory is still good. Will try and dig up a pic of them in production
One of my college roommates interned for Cobalt Networks. One of the projects they assigned him writing the code for front controls and display for the Raq 3. I remember him having prototype servers in his room and we hacked the PCI card to support a sound card (the PCI bus on the server only supported 3.3 volts, and most decent sound cards needed the 5v pin as well. So we had to pull the power with bodge wires from other stable sources on the motherboard. In the end we ended up turning one of the early Cobalt Networks prototype servers into a MP3 jukebox for the house 🤣. I did loooove that blue case too.
When I worked for an ISP in the late 90's, we deployed hundreds of the Qube, I still have a Raq3
These were absolutely amazing back in the day. Ran my first hosting business off one of them. The web UI was the killer app as well. It made management of the server a doddle and lowered the barrier for getting into hosting. Which was a double edged sword, if you didn't have the Linux chops for when things went wrong. I learnt so much running one of these.
Hah, I remember these. In fact, really really really wanted to get one back in the day to toy around with Apache and web projects. Now a cheap tiny SBC from Raspberry Pi or Odroid doesn't just outpower these but also the best Sun and SGI servers of the day, by a pretty long shot.
There's something oddly fascinating about this video.
As someone who grew up on the early web, but never paid much thought to the technology behind it at the time, this opened up a whole new avenue of nostalgia for me. There's something too about the translucent plastic faceplate - that kind of design was really isolated to just a few years in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it really ties the whole thing together as a piece of its time.
Thank you so much for making this video!
I made a bunch of web-based games, written as 100% HTML (no Java, Flash, JavaScript, etc. -- became very popular with the WebTV crowd).
They were CGI scripts -- written in C -- so all the forking wreaked havoc on my ISP's webserver. So they moved me to a Cobolt RaQ, which I lived on for a few years. Them's were the days!
PS - The site is still up. It still gets a tiny bit of traffic & don't have the heart to kill it yet. Going on 25 years (plus a few more when they were hosted on my university's Computer Science dept's Sun server). 👴
What's the site?
@@ryancxx i just googled bill kendrick games and found it
Seconded, this sounds like a nice corner of internet history, share the link so we can enjoy it again 😊
@@ryancxx if he not answer you, we can assume he just lie...
@@vasiovasio or youtube censors any links
Brings back memories! These Cobalt servers were a big part of my early career in web development, and helped me move onto more advanced server administration. They really were fantastic! Thanks for the vid 👍🏻
We used these as marimba transmitters. At that time, fully managed thick desktops and electronic software distribution was brand new
I remember the cobalt team being very easy to work with.
Ours were x86 based. We had several hundred.
I built my hosting company using the RAQ2, RAQ3, RAQ4, RAQ XTR and finally the RAQ 550. Moved over to high end Dell servers with Plesk not too long after Sun took over.
Was heartbreaking to dismantle 2 whole 40U racks full of cobalt servers when they went EOL.
Me too. 550s were the only decent ones out of the bunch but the software was still awful
It was a different time. Back then, this stuff had personality, and was lovable, rather than just being a cog in the machine wot runs the business and generates paychecks.
Really happy to have discovered this channel. Can't wait for more videos!
Us too!
Same man
I remember the company I worked for circa 2000-2003 had one Cobalt Qube and few RaQ3's. The Qube was used by web developers and designers, while RaQ3 were used for office related applications also were used by our clients. Still remember the feeling of booting up these plug-n-play web servers for the first time.
I used to be a product manager for a UK business service provider (Easynet) and the hosted Raq service was one of the first products I launched. I'm pretty sure Compaq DL180s were available then so it wasn't the first 1U server, but one of the joys of the Raq was it wasn't deep so you could 'back to back' them in a rack and have 80 in one 42U 600x800mm cab. They also didn't kick out a lot of heat or use much power so the generally dreadful DC power and cooling design of the mid to late 90s could cope with it (so long as you didn't have an entire row of them). Happy days!
The one simple problem was, and still is that making the server easy to use does not in any way remove the requirements for good technical skills. You need those to build a well functioning and secure environment, back then, and today.
Yes, good point! We think the RaQs were very popular because the "level 1" tech issues could easily be done with the front panel LCD and control buttons, and a RaQ could be re-installed by just connecting to it with a laptop booted from the restore CD. However, yes, a company running these should have also had people responsible for security practices.
It doesnt... but it sure makes it alot quicker. I think a lot of people runnin web hosts have no business doing so, lol.
Ha, die Bart! Tijdens het kijken van deze video moest ik al snel aan jou denken. En daar ben je dan in de comments!
Was it using Sendmail as its MTA? I did wrestle with that for a few years (even bought the book). Then we discovered Postfix, tried switching to that ... and never looked back.
@@laurensdejong6149 Haha, tja.. ik ben best redelijk actief op youtube.
I remember paying for those Cobalt RaQ 3 servers from a web hosting company back in 1998. They was pretty good and easy to use web server. I always wanted to buy one for nostalgic purposes lol. Thank you for sharing this video. Have a great day.
Well, once this series is done, you will know what your getting into, seeing those bulging caps on the mother board on both servers, says they probably are all like these.
@@marcusdamberger Yeah well almost 30 year old boxes. I expected them caps to be EOL. I look at a few on ebay but they are asking for too much LOL. I'm not paying top dollar for them.
Me too. I actually got to adopt a few of these back when the ISP I worked at replaced them with newer, more capable hardware. I enjoyed tinkering with them, but passed them on after their older architecture became a liability, and the bespoke form factor of the motherboard negated any reasonable upgrade path.
Now I want one again. Why? Absolutely no good reason. They're just adorable, and remind me of a time when technology was more exciting.
Great video. I’m looking forward to more content from you!
Just found your channel. Awesome stuff. Subscribed, liked and all that jazz. Looking forwards to more videos, Keep up the great work!!
Ah man, I have a big fascination with old web servers. Waiting for the next videos! Subscribed.
Cobalt had a Great Staff of Engineers they did all the Board Design in house. The beta boards (PCB) were Fabbed locally (San Jose) I sent out all the Gerber files got the Components the BOM for assembly and sent them all out to a place in Santa Cruz. Worked with some Great People! Thanks Takes me back!! Can't believe is missed this video (I blame thockin, Man I was on the Sysengr team!!!).. (subscribed, so I wont miss another)
hehe the serial output got me man nicely done, love the music fade in so immersive.
Wow, blast from the past. Thank you! Installed about 20 of these in the late 90's. This is a great channel. Much appreciation. Great to see all of the other comments as well.
I had one of these! what a product! Thank you for your coverage!
Wow such an amazing video! Really like the idea of this channel. Keep it up.
Glad that you speak clearly and don't bs around. I love this type of content and have subscribed.
6:39 - "Initializing IDE" this takes me back bro. Thank you.
This video was just amazing! Subbed! About to go on a binge watch of your channel!
I remember when the startup ISP I worked for went from a modem rack room (cooled 24/7 by over a dozen fans) to a Livingston Portmaster. It was such an amazing change.
I completely forgot about this company. Thanks for unlocking some hidden memories of the Y2K era
Amazing channel with super cool, old but golden techy information videos, just subscribed! Thank you!
It is a crime that you don't have more subscribers. I thoroughly enjoyed that episode.
Back in 2005 or so i bought one of the original cube cobolt server and kept that thing for several years.
Man this brought back some good memories - I installed dozens of these and the Cube variants in school systems back then. Such a fun time back then
What a shame, Sun destroyed Cobalt after they acquired them and I think it was intentional. I ran a farm of these back in the day and even had a Cube or two at home. Fun days those were
remember seeing this at an expo in Switzerland.
I was a very young man with an enthusiastic Dad.
beautiful video! instant sub! Had a qube and many raqs, beautiful machines ! Thanks.
Subbed!! Seems like you have awesome content. I hope to see more
Thanks for the sub!
That was a fantastic little box!
I ran five of these for a few years to support services on a small college network. I recall having our intern wipe them and put on NetBSD when the shipped OS was no longer supported. Cool little boxes!
another great video, thank you
Thank you youtube algorithm. Super interesting video btw, never would have known about any of this stuff. Super interesting to see how the internet we know today started out with servers like that.
Made my day... That was our First Dedicated server we used for WebHosting!
the old Cobalt RAQ
love that kind of content, thx
Nice blast from the past. Thank you! I remember installing the Cobalt Cubes back in the day! Primarily for email.
Love seeing this stuff. Neat story and video
Had two, a 3 and 4. Absolutely amazing machines! Ran my own personal sites on them for around a decade.
Still have 2 of these boxes - a RaQ and 3 - really solid products!
Looking forward to seeing this followon
15.8k subs, this channel is gonna go far ❤
I remember these and they were fantastic!
Brings back some memories! Used to admin a few of these in 99-00
This video bring back fond memories of working in a NOC and managing rack and rack of these servers... Then everyone moved to dell, HP, and Compaq servers.
That was the first server I ever had in 2002. I had it for 6 months then upgraded to a true 1U dedicated server. The RaQ was pretty cool.
My first ever server was a raq3, was impressive platform for not only providing dedicated servers, but also reseller setups
One, this is a really cool video. Two you shouldn't need to reset the root password. This version of the kernel should be vulnerable to the backspace bug. Just press backspace 28 times at the password prompt. I believe that works in this version of the kernel.
That’s a pretty massive bug!
@@chrisdickens4862 C man. It’s a crazy language.
@@Dygear LOL. Really, it was just the slap-shod nature of early C APIs. scanf and friends, namely. C, itself, is certainly unforgiving, but not inherently broken. I still haven't found a language I love as much as C. :-)
I hadn't seen these in ages. Damn this brings back some memories.
I remember installing Cobalt Networks Cache RaQ 2 boxes for companies with "slow" internet connections I should have kept a few when they were decommissioned as they seam to be worth a small fortune now!
Oh boy, I had several Cobalt RaQ servers in my first data center on the 11th floor of an office building in downtown Cleveland with a whopping 3Mbps on a bonded T1. We also installed a few Cobalt Qube’s at client sites. Great memories!
Awesome video. Subscribed.
I have two of these in my garage that ran my not-for-profit world wide car club for 10+ years. Have three actually, two of the RAQ 4s and one of the long chassis Intel based RAQ XTR 4 drive one. If I recall, I ran them from about 2005-2016 with progressions of supported OS up through BlueOnyx. The XTR got containerized into a VM on VMware and the RAQ 4s were decommissioned after migration of domains to the XTR. I loved these machines and it became my stepping stone for CentOS knowledge that put me where I am today in Enterprise IT Infrastructure. Will be watching this series.
These were my introduction to Linux. Have been hooked since :)
Great video!
Bought several Qube's back in the 90's for small satellite offices. They were reasonably cheap and reliable. Loved them.
yep they were rock solid, I can only remember ours had down time when UPS batteries needed to be swapped due to age or failure and or if there was a reboot for a update. Rock solid.. for nostalgia factor I picked up a used Qube and Raq just because they were such a revolutionary device. they still function perfectly.. The killer "app" for my company, that was hosting web and email inside the company. Back then we were paying the ISP for each email address and domain hosting and were on dial up still, a modem in each computer that had internet access and dial up.. they went from dial up internet to a wireless connection over 2 miles at 256k, it basically paid for its self in a year and allowed email accounts and internet for everyone, instead of just for upper management.. Back in those years being a tech person was so much fun, you could walking into any part of a company and make changes that were drastic improvements in cost and efficiency.
My dad owned an ISP during the height of these Cobalts, I remember seeing them on the shelf and wondering what they were.
I remember installing a Cobalt Qube as an email server in 1999 (occasional dial-out to ISP on an ISDN2e line to fetch/send) - delightful little thing to configure...
I have a few lying around, will start playing with them again😊
This channel needs more subs.
I owned a few of these when I started a small hosting service in '99. They were great.
I loved the couple of RaQ 3s I had.
Interesting video. I'm a grey-haired infrastructure engineer, and even to me it's slightly astonishing that the concept of a 1U server was once considered novel.
You're braver than me though, plugging in 20-year old hardware with visible cap failure!
another channel that is gold
love the transparent blue!!
I remember these. I was working at IBM support in the late 90's/early 00's and was the lead for the support contract for these
I remember seeing stacks of these in our datacenters. Good times. Rack after rack after rack from floor to ceiling.
I remember drooling over this back in the days. Never came across one, though.
Well that's a blast from the past. I haven't thought about Cobalt in 20 years or more. The hardware is so familiar I think we must have had some - the rackmount version specifically. I can feel those neurons firing but can't quite dredge up the details - that was half a lifetime ago.
I think I still have about a hundred Raq3's. I have some new in box. Burst caps can be found in basically each and every one of them, even NIB. They blow caps, the RAM had a higher-than-average failure rate, some of their hard drives had problems overheating the controller boards, and fans died all the time. It's hard to say whether their low price offset the common hardware problems, but they certainly were ubiquitous and made a huge impact in decentralizing server farms.
Great video. I remember my k6-2 333. The first PC I built myself, the First computer I had with an AGP video card, which my gf bought me at the time. A rage 2 pro if I remember right. Couldn't play rainbow 6 without it. All the way back when I started building websites. Thanks for the memories...
Thanks a lot. I had forgotten about this... thing.
I have two Cobalt machines in my house, a Qube3 and a Raq2. Used to use the Qube for doing web dev locally before deploying to remote servers back in 2000.
I worked there, was the product manager for the Qube II.
We used a couple of those at the company I worked for at the time (around 2000-2001). We had two set up in a HA web server, which at the time was a pretty neat trick for a plug and play appliance.
Beautiful
I ran MIPS RaQs with Debian for a long time as router/firewall boxes for several customers. They were only replaced when those customers' Internet connection outpaced the packet forwarding capabilities of the RaQs. The last two in service got switched over to NetBSD/cobalt before being removed from service, which was much faster than Debian at that point.
I'm still running a Qube2 on my desk as a persistent IRC client (screen + irssi), running NetBSD/cobalt 9.3. One Ethernet port sits on the public Internet (we have a static /28), the other talks to the Ethernet segment for old computers. The only failure was the mechanical hard disk several years ago, which was replaced with a mSATA SSD and an IDE adapter. PSUs were supposed to be a weak point but I don't think I ever got a Qube that actually *had* the external power supply...always ended up adapting something else!
Memories! I started my first "hosting business" with one of these.
Holy cow. I totally forgot about these. My old hardware pile might have a raq2 from my highschool days. They were becoming super adorable on eBay which means I scraped some money together and bought a used one.
Those look just like the ones we had in our old hastings location down to the box1 and box2 labels on the racks.
I used to work a lot on these cobalt servers. its exactly how I remember these.
I remember the year of 1998 sitting in my classroom looking out as I wrote the date at the top of the page; I think in late 99 we got a new it suite and man in was mind blowing! I was pretty late to console gaming but I was no stranger to an Amiga by that point. Fun times!
I remember wanting to buy a Cobat RaQ in the mid aughts. I was setting up a community WiFi network and wanted something for users to look at when they connected. I ended up using a Windows 2000 machine and it ended up hosting much more than just a web server.
I had absolutely no idea this even existed!
Definitely bring one of them back and host a public website from it !
& Other you can swap the motherboard for one of those itx celeron or pentium boards and host a modern website from there.
Unfortunately that isn't so easy. The RaQ (3 at least) uses a ROM that helps to boot up and start the os. So it is also pretty difficult to upgrade the os too.
Back about 2005 or so you get updated ROMs and some other goodies and do a fair bit of updating. But even at that level it would have a very old PHP and MySQL (and 1 other db, I can't remember it's name) and apache etc. It'd be suuuuper risky for a hack.
Mine was later maintained by an outsourced expert and it was much better then. But they were a truly great box!
Putting one behind HAProxy (lock down the various config page endpoints) and Stunnel (For modern SSL) would allow it to be safely used to host a live website. Not that it could host MUCH, but a static page or even a very crushed video would be doable! I don't believe these even have gigabit ethernet so your major consideration will be bandwidth.
These are really cool and were very popular in schools where I'm from as general internal webhosts. I remember my school had one that was hacked to allow a fileserver, hidden and wiped nightly, that we'd all use to share music and games in the computer lab! So DO make sure your HAProxy config *only* allows your specified server locations to be accessed by the internet.
I wouldn't bother upgrading it, TBH. It's plenty sufficient to chuck some HTML over the fence. It doesn't take much. It won't serve millions of hits per day, running complex back-ends, all over HTTPS... but it doesn't need to do any of that.