Why you MUST Sign This Internet Guestbook - Cobalt RaQ Part 3
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- We made it! The finale of our Cobalt RaQ 3 restoration series. In this installment, we battle through some issues getting the original software restored. At long last, we finally get to see what we've all been waiting for: the RaQ hosting an actual website!
We also share some BIG announcements for the channel you don't want to miss!
Visit the Serial Port RaQ homepage: raq.serialport.org/
Support our channel! Patreon + Discord community: / serialport
Chapters:
00:00 - Online at last
00:14 - Intro
00:49 - Software options
01:40 - First attempt
02:50 - Second attempt
03:35 - Third attempt
03:51 - Restore process
05:09 - Setup wizard
06:10 - The big reveal
06:40 - Announcements
07:24 - Outro
Music: raimu - overgrown
#90s #internet #server
looks like we crashed the poor thing
oh no
Working at Cobalt ('99 through the Sun acquisition) is still the best job I ever had. Finding this video was awesome. Thank you. Shout out to any other alum that find this.
The hacker known as 4chan strikes again
Seeing all those Cobalt screens really brings back memories of supporting these at EV1 back in the day.
I am a fellow EV1'er!!! I remember spawning up 1000 Cobalt 4i's in 1 night at the TW data center
4:30 I was about to say I'm glad you included footage of the boot process etc so we can see the real thing, and then you asked if we want the entire process. Yes definitely, I want to see the entire thing, the actual experience of using it isn't just press go and cut to an hour in the future. The software config is the best part I want to see. Thanks for making this
Definitely do a full resto vid if possible. These old server doohickeys are things of wonder
If you're having trouble accessing their site, make sure your using http instead of https. Your browser might be forcing https by default like mine did.
I hate the "https default" change.
@@PsRohrbaughI think defaulting to https is a good thing, they just need to do a little better job of falling back to http if it doesn't find anything
@@PsRohrbaugh I don't get why you would dislike it? Also it appears the website works fine under https (now?)
@@JordanPlayz158 I view HTTPS as like, a bulletproof vest. There are plenty of circumstances where you need one. But there are many more where it's unnecessary overhead.
If my ISP is tracking my activity, they can still see what IP I'm connecting to, and possibly even my DNS queries. So yeah HTTPS obscures the URL, but that's it.
I guess my point is that I feel the break in compatability is not worth the benefits.
Personal example: I ran a small business. We had a website we set up in 2008. It was one page, no links, just a simple "about us" paragraph and our contact information. I had to go and pay someone to update it to HTTPS because we started getting complaints that our website "was down".
@@PsRohrbaugh mean, it doesn’t just “obscure the URL”, it stops your ISP and any other parties which are traversed along the way from being able to just read the plain text you’d otherwise be sending back and forth. This is not an occasion when I’d be reminiscing about the “good old days”. If I came across a website today which was not using SSL/TLS I would not trust them in any capacity.
I'd love to restore one of these and have a small webpage on it. Kinda wish my network could support it safely. Good work on restoring it.
I think we all would love to see a full restore version of the video.
This brings back memories when I had my dedicated server RAQ 3. I was paying around $200 a month back in the late 90s for 2 years. I went through many web host providers too. I was running a bunch of sites making money. I always wanted to get one for old time sakes and place it on my home data center to bring it back from its former glory. Great video series. Thank you for showing this. Have a great day.
I was just the 69420th member to visit the guestbook site, what an honor!
I have just purchased a RaQ to add to my Sun collection. As you mention, this product was an innovative product with its front panel display and configuration buttons and its web based config interface. My Sun collection is all Motorola based Sun1u, Sun2 and Sun3 systems. I am adding the RaQ along with a Sun Netra 1 as these were milestone machines from the late 90's. Great video.
I still remember attending the Cobalt Networks conference in Vegas around the time of the Sun announcement. If my memory is correct, it was announced directly before or during the conference, but it was a long time ago. The RaQ was a game changer for the ISP that I worked for and allowed us to get into web hosting. I tossed the last few RaQs a had about 10 years ago. I wish I would have held one to one of them now.
It has a construction gif, legend!
This video has inspired me to get my RaQ 3 out of storage, and power it up for the first time in 5 years. Hopefully it still works but I'll check the capacitors to make sure. I previously installed NetBSD on it, but went back to the original installation - and I had many problems with booting as well. It was so long ago that I forgot how I did it, eventually.
Your guestbook's been attacked and it looks like someone's posted the entire bible!
So glad I found this channel. Really enjoy seeing these old technologies brought back to life.
Great videos, beautiful hardware, awesome project. Thanks!
I absolutely love that you got this system working again. Brings back all the good memories of when I was just starting out carving out my corner of the net.
This brings back so many memories (and a few nightmares) with these Cobalt RAQ servers! I've even done the re-install procedure at some point, due to a totally bricked harddisk.
Checked it out with my modern iPhone with no prob…EXCELLENT JOB! 👍🏻😁
Great job! Would love to see you restore the other unit as well!!
ooh, and now running TLS on it!! I was totally hoping for an HTTP server for showing off Wireshark, but good on y'all for getting TLS 1.3 on your Raq3, when it isn't guaranteed on most web servers still.
These new things like the website hosting looks amazing! I’ll definitely consider one of those emails. (Even if that means loosing my AOL domain) Great video btw. Felt like a minute.
This is awesome! Great work guys
This is a great video. man, it takes me back!
Very cool. Can't wait to see the web interface when it comes back up.
Great series. Subscribed! :)
Nice to see another piece of Cobalt hardware up and running!
The quality of these videos are always quite high and the topics are interesting.
I racked dozens of those back in the day. Hell, hundreds.
This is very cool. Love it.
So cool to see old hardware shine again
Yes I would LOVE to see a full restoration vid on this
Amazing! Love to see this baby on the Internet in 2023 :)
Great Video!
I have a Raq2 and a Qube3 sitting here. Both work but reluctant to leave them connected to my network since they can't be updated with security fixes. They really were nice little machines.
I used to work the the sole distributor of Cobalt products in Malaysia. The products mostly sold to startups and data centres.
After Sun bought Cobalt, the company lost the distributorship and I left.
Awesome 🎉
By the way. I am increasing your counter on the web site
Did the site get pwned already? That was quick.
yes please post the full video of the install, i couldnt read all the code fast enough hahaha thank you!
Amazing vid 😁
Dear lord. Someone posted entire bible in the guest book.
I would love to see the full restore procedure of the cobalt.
Less then four hours and it already got XSS'd
Always remember to sanitize your inputs.
Edit: Its dead Jim. Response code 500 on post. oof.
Those page loads are fast!
Nice RaQ.
I need to get afew myself and have a blast from the past. I think we all would love to see a fll version of the restore process from that desktop computer to the server itself.
Edit: If anyone in the US and looking for one they are all online but the prices are all over the place. AnyWhere from $350 to $2200 USD. I guess I will not be getting one unless someone has one for sale at a good price? Anything vintage or old for servers are going for a lot of money online.
It's been pwnd, might wanna bring it down
I was the 11,000 Visitor!!!
nice.
I got a Qube and a Raq3 sitting around. I had an issues with my Raq not wanting to work with my router and port forwarding. When it would get a request, it would go to send back out and it didn;t know where to send the data.
Great video, not seeing the raq in action personally,
I own one of the biggest Sun Microsystems collection on the planet, also have lots of software for it.
If you need anything, please ask
I suspect weekly backups won’t be enough :P
Cute server. Guestbook signed. Is that comment in database on Cobalt RaQ machine?
I have a RaQ 4i with the original drive and maybe an extra drive and restore CD and matching nic. I haven't used them in years, but in about 2010 of 2011 I restored it from cd, then played with it for just a short bit and put it back in it's box.
I may be interested in donating it. But that would be a conversation to have in private of course. If you are able and interested, please pm me.
You inspired me to dust off my RaQ 4, replace all the capacitors, and get booting again. I would love if you could upload the detail install process for getting the OS on the Compact Flash drive.
Actually, you may be surprised to learn that the (imo) best way to clone an OS drive / entire hard disk is in fact dead simple. Source HDD can even have multiple \ complex partitions, multi-os \ dual boot - thats fine, no extra steps needed. The tool is dd. dd will give you perfect, block by block replication. Your new clone will boot just fine, so long as the original did. In the very least, gotta read linux man page on dd. With powerful low level tools that can do great good, well, they're equally capable of royally trashing the wrong hdd / ssd should the user make a type-o or not fully understand whats going on. So please, read up before attempting, but basically it is as simple as running this with superuser permissions on linux "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb". When I use dd, I add a couple extra options. We want everything written by the time we think the clone is done, not hanging around in buffer while you're unplugging your usb dock. Setting a block size (usually 1M or 4M) can improve the speed of large drives being cloned. And normally, you have no idea how 'far along' dd has gotten till it tells you "done", so we can fix that too. The command I quoted, with those three improvements, would be "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb oflag=sync bs=1M status=progress".
AGAIN this is an example. dd has earned being called "disk destroyer" because, if you don't know what you're doing, you'll go from running to crashed & can't even boot to the grub prompt, all in less than a minute. "lsblk" is essential to be used before dd. It shows all your block devices (hdd / usb / flash etc) and what they'd be named in /dev/.
I wonder if it had to do with network card speed. We’re you trying to negotiate with gigabit when you needed to be on FE?
RaQ is dying from memes lol
I think i killed it with corrupted text
at least i didnt post r34 content XD
Aaaand someone defaced it already. Cool series
Yeeeeup, just had a look and someone's spammed the front page with porn.
@@philpem i cannot access the site at all lol
Somebody left a very lengthy post on the raq website and now it's practically unusable. Can you set a limit to the post content and post size? That should solve a few issues.
Maybe disallow images too lol
Is your website part of the Cobalt webring yet?
No SSL/TLS support? Should be available since the technology already existed in the 90s.
I just stared at your raq for 7 minutes. Hue hue hue.
Lol the guestbook has no input filtering, people loading that thing up with script tags left and right
would be cool if you setup a IRC and ICQ server aswell
Full restoration video please, with ASMR 🤓
The page is already forwarding to 4chan. Someone cracked the site or injected something in a comment.
What about the other RAQ? Lets fix that up!
The internet isn't what it used to be... You're going to have to protect this webserver somehow, looks like it's already hacked and the guestbook is full of crap (no captcha?)
Is the website open source? So we can add some input validation...
What network card are you using on the IBM Aptiva?
We ended up using a Linksys LNE100TX in the IBM that performed the restore
@@theserialport Thanks! i ordered the exact model for restore my Cobalt Qube 3
wait so the restore CD contained a linux OS which you needed to install to an external machine? You then needed to connect the this machine to the actual server with a eth cable? The machine would then use network boot to load itself onto the server & overwrite the HDD to install itself? Why couldn't you just copy the disk content onto the HDD of the server directly and boot normally?
Because the disc content is a restore utility, not a regular install of the device software. And it doesn't need to be installed, it's a "Live CD" - boot from the CD/DVD and run the restore software from there. It connects over the network and transfers the needed files to the device. If you just copy it directly to the hard drive, your RaQ would now just be a recovery device for other RaQs.
Worst I've had to deal with personally - I once had to create a netboot server on a Raspberry Pi so that I could install an OS on an old Compaq DL... uhh 320 I think? With a broken CD drive. And I had to use a very old version of CentOS on that netboot server to get a kernel with the old Compaq RAID controller drivers still baked in. But booting and installing an OS over the network from a slow as molasses RPi was fascinating.
Seems like there was a bit of a problem with the guestbook perl script...
Was there a website in it before you wiped it?
I'd love to know.
THIS! Surely they had a poke around in the Apache folders to see what was in there.
looks like the site got raided?
down already? :(
🤓👍
RIP someone hacked it already. Getting lots of text box popups.
i'm stuck on a cloudflare capatcha when I try accessing the website
Y2k y'all!
Someone seems to have posted the entire Bible in the guestbook.
yeah lol, not what we expected to see haha
did it get pwned already
would have love to have seen what it was hosting before it was wiped
Posted on the GB...
There is Cloudflare in front of it. So if you open that page you are actually talking with a big CDN and not that shown server.
Makes sense… easiest way to avoid problems with modern browsers forcing https connections. Throw cloudflare in front of it as an ssl/tls proxy.
Thinking back to the late 90’s/early naughties, server overhead for https connections was a concern, that could be part of the reason to use cloudflare.
OMG, I haven't seen "cgi-bin" in half a lifetime! 😢
Is that counter accurate? The internet is full of bots that scan websites maliciously and for research purposes, they may even have been the first to discover this website before us! With the exception of the creator.
Yes we think its accurate.. server is running slow with high traffic now but I think people like to refresh and see the counter go up?
"your IP address will be logged and posted publicly". It has cloudflare in front which supports IPv6 and I indeed visited the site over IPv6... But can it actually cope with an IPv6 address? :D
This is really cool. Are there any security concerns hosting something like this?
There most likely are due to the very outdated software. At 6:01, he mentions that they set it up on a network isolated from all their other stuff in case it gets hacked.
I think I said this on another vid, but my work had 5 of these that I tested and listed. All worked, but we fucked shipping up on 2 of them and I think they got lost :(
It has a socket-7, the cpu could be upgraded
It's already down. I wanted to sign. I guess no one is getting email or old style domains.
There might have been a temporary interruption, but the site is up now
@@theserialport Cool, I'll check it out again. Thx.
website is down.
My server works sign up there
doesn't work with netscape because cloudflare tries to force a are you human test in https, and in modern html.
Nice work great video. Dont put random usb drives in your pc ;)
Welp, that guest page got defaced real quick. 😅😅😅
I worked with these remotely. Pretty slow even back then. My desktop PC was way faster.
There's a lot of spam and porn on there already 😅😅
cleaned it up!