Did anyone remember to thank their Sys Admin yesterday? The guys that run our systems here at The Frontier Group are a great bunch of dudes, I think I’ll buy them some beers.

Ross’s Auctions (sic: yes I know that the third ’s’ should not be there, but that’s how they spell it) today had a Cobalt RaQ 4 up for auction, so I thought I’d go along and see what it went for. I set a ceiling of $100, knowing that the only way I’d secure it for that price is if nobody there knew what it was, and was scared to bid blindly. I’m saving for the move into Vic Park with Maggie, and can’t afford to be squandering too much money at the moment. Yet, this was the first time I’d seen a RaQ up for auction, so I thought I might strike it lucky…

Considering they sell on eBay for about US$600-700, I thought that anything below AU$400 would be a real bargain (for a collector/someone who knew what it was). As the machine is just a PIII 450 with dual 20GB disks (in RAID 1 formation) it’s not too special on the inside.

Yet clearly it’s very special on the outside! The Cobalt symbol on the front glows light green when it’s on, similar to my Cobalt Qube 2.

These machines were originally introduced to the market by Cobalt as a simple, cheap and easy to configure “web hosting company in a box” solution. At 1RU they could be stacked 42 high in a six-foot rack, making for a sensible co-location or dedicated server solution. Vianet used Intel ISP2150 boxes, but should have bought these instead. Another reason Vianet a fools :)

Cobalt was so successful that Sun bought them out; back in the time when being bought out by Sun would have been a good thing :) The punch their little blue boxes packed was infringing on Sun’s entry-level UNIX server market, so the quickest way to stop them was a takeover. Shortly after, Sun ceased producing the co-branded Cobalt/Sun devices, and one of the dot-com greats finally ground to a halt.

The “Best Looking Rack-Mountable Machine” award still has to go so SGI though for their range of servers. This one pictured is an Origin 350. Don’t be confused but the cobalt.gif filename, as I was originally ;) I know an SGI when I see it…

In the end, a young geek bought this particular RaQ 4 for $275 (plus 10%, plus 10%) and I thought it was a good buy. My quirky museum would love another Cobalt, especially a RaQ, but at just over $330 bucks, someone else can enjoy it instead.

I must admit, it was weird, but when I saw it went to a young guy just like me, I felt a sense of satisfaction. At least it wasn’t sold to a grumpy, stingy old dealer who was going to make a stack of bucks by reselling it on eBay.

I meant to note this down earlier, as I’m sure it will be really handy in the future some time; I should even include it in my standard firewall script.

This rule takes any outbound packets that are heading with a destination port of 25 (SMTP mail) and forces them through a target mail server. In Kalgoorlie, I used this so that people didn’t have to change their mail client settings. People thought they were sending mail through their ISP’s mail server (iiNet’s for example) but it was really getting sent out Telstra’s.

It looks like Martin Michlmayr of Debian fame has released a mini-howto discussing Sarge on Cobalt’s MIPs machines, including the Qube 2 that I own. Something to add to my list of tasks :)

With my hobby (collecting older and more unusual computer systems) I find it hard sometimes to provide reasoning or explaination as to why I have the equipment. Computers have until recently been work horses, and not things you amass simply for fun. Because of this natural association with computers and their ability to work, I have difficulty sometimes explaining to others why I simply colelct them in the same way people collect coins, stamps or Barbie dolls.

In searching for a purpose for my gear, I sometimes get good ideas, like when I set my Sun Ultra 5 (with its 5 network interfaces) as a core router for our LAN at home. I’d like my Cobalt to be running a virtual radio station, using some MP3 streaming software to constantly pump out a RTSP stream that a media player application can hook into. The disk is only 8GB in size, so an upgrade would be needed there, but not huge - only in the order of 30GB or so, which I can find from my current hardware stash.

At Diggers today we ran out of vacant IP address leases on the DHCP server! This means that we were pushing more than 230 people out through the network, which is amazing.

After a bit of a think, and a call to Steve I increased the subnet from /24 to /23, meaning that 192.168.12.1 to 192.168.13.254 were available addresses.

Initially I had attempted to assign a virtual interface with a /24 subnet to eth0, and hoped that it would answer half the DHCP requests with a 192.168.13.x IP, but that didn’t happen. A quick call to Steve and he confirmed my fears, and agreed that increasing the subnet was the easiest solution.

Now, if we get more than 480 IPs used up, we’re in trouble ;)