Jonathan Oxer
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Blog > The RaQ2 lives again
>> The RaQ2 lives again
Fri, Jun 30th 9:08am 2006: Tech Toys
A long time ago my business bought some Cobalt RaQ2 microservers which provided sterling service hosting customer websites for a number of years. The first time I saw one was at a PC show or something in Melbourne and I was instantly smitten.
Yes, I'm partial to a bit of shiny.
After much scraping and scrounging I got together enough cash to actually buy one a little while later, and moved all my customer's sites off the previous MacOS / WebSTAR combination I'd been running on a smorgasboard of Macintosh II / IIx machines piled in the corner (remember, this was quite some years ago!) and I've got to say the RaQ2 was a total godsend at the time. I loved my RaQ2, and it's how I was introduced to Linux so I'm forever grateful for that. I was already running NetBSD on a couple of Mac SE30s but it was the RaQ2 that really gave me the Unix addiction.
So eventually as the business grew and more machines were bought we ended up moving to whitebox hardware running (very briefly) on Red Hat, and it was about then that I discovered Debian and the rest is history.
But I digress. The point is that at 250Mhz with 64MB RAM the old RaQ2s we had lying around haven't been much use as production machines for a long time, especially with the oddball version of Red Hat they run by default. So a couple of days ago I pulled them out of the racks they'd been sleeping in for the last couple of years and started hunting around for ways to resurrect them, even if only as toys. I even gutted one of them to try to fit in a micro ATX motherboard with a PIII 1GHz, but it would have taken a lot of metalwork mods to get the ports out the back and the LCD would never have worked. And the LCD is half the fun of a Cobalt, so that plan was out.
But to my great joy I discovered that some very smart people (including my friend Martin) have put serious work into getting Debian running on them, with a whole "cobalt" port just for the early MIPS-based Cobalt machines. Woot! So, after a bit of soldering of a null-modem cable, setting up of a netboot server, and poking around I now have one of the RaQ2s running Sarge. And the LCD even works!
A long time ago my business bought some Cobalt RaQ2 microservers which provided sterling service hosting customer websites for a number of years. The first time I saw one was at a PC show or something in Melbourne and I was instantly smitten.
Yes, I'm partial to a bit of shiny.
After much scraping and scrounging I got together enough cash to actually buy one a little while later, and moved all my customer's sites off the previous MacOS / WebSTAR combination I'd been running on a smorgasboard of Macintosh II / IIx machines piled in the corner (remember, this was quite some years ago!) and I've got to say the RaQ2 was a total godsend at the time. I loved my RaQ2, and it's how I was introduced to Linux so I'm forever grateful for that. I was already running NetBSD on a couple of Mac SE30s but it was the RaQ2 that really gave me the Unix addiction.
So eventually as the business grew and more machines were bought we ended up moving to whitebox hardware running (very briefly) on Red Hat, and it was about then that I discovered Debian and the rest is history.
But I digress. The point is that at 250Mhz with 64MB RAM the old RaQ2s we had lying around haven't been much use as production machines for a long time, especially with the oddball version of Red Hat they run by default. So a couple of days ago I pulled them out of the racks they'd been sleeping in for the last couple of years and started hunting around for ways to resurrect them, even if only as toys. I even gutted one of them to try to fit in a micro ATX motherboard with a PIII 1GHz, but it would have taken a lot of metalwork mods to get the ports out the back and the LCD would never have worked. And the LCD is half the fun of a Cobalt, so that plan was out.
But to my great joy I discovered that some very smart people (including my friend Martin) have put serious work into getting Debian running on them, with a whole "cobalt" port just for the early MIPS-based Cobalt machines. Woot! So, after a bit of soldering of a null-modem cable, setting up of a netboot server, and poking around I now have one of the RaQ2s running Sarge. And the LCD even works!
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