Museum Puts Decades-Old Cobalt RaQ Back On the Internet (serialport.org) 33
New submitter aphexx writes: A computer museum has revived and rebuilt a Cobalt RaQ 3 server appliance from the Y2K days of the internet. It's now online and accessible -- complete with an ancient CGI guestbook at http://raq.serialport.org/. There were thousands upon thousands of Cobalt RaQs and Qubes scattered across the globe in the 2000s, and I remember they were especially popular with ISPs. Judging from the guestbook comments, it looks like I'm not the only one that remembers their impact. Cobalt was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2002 for a cool $2 billion, but discontinued the product line the following year.
Like the SGI Challenge S, had expensive blue LEDs (Score:2)
Just like the SGI Challenge S, had expensive blue LEDs on the front that only data center technicians would ever see.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't remember any blue LEDs on the RaQs... we had over a hundred RaQ, RaQ2, RaQ3, RaQ4, and RaQ550 total (I think I still have a couple of 550s in the closet). All the LEDs I remember were plain old green. The whole front of the case was blue plastic though.
I actually got my job at that ISP in part because the former lead systems admin went to work for Cobalt.
Re: (Score:2)
I know the Cobalt Qubes were often put where others would see them, as they were often used by smaller businesses such as restaurants, usually behind glass but I remember seeing quite a few.
For the rack mounted once I remember seeing them so someone must have had them out and about somewhere. Some machine rooms have windows; though it was a bigger thing in the past because you wanted to show it them off sometimes.
Countdown to botnet: 3... 2... 1... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't even imagine how many unpatched known security holes an operating system from the turn of the century must have. Is this really a good idea?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, first of all, /. linking directly to the poor little thing is probably going to be a bad start (there were some great videos about its restoration).
As for your question, it was answered in the video: they have it well segregated on their network and the drive is imaged. It can be restored very quickly.
Re: (Score:2)
As for your question, it was answered in the video: they have it well segregated on their network and the drive is imaged. It can be restored very quickly.
Just the XSS vulnerabilities alone for something like that could potentially be a big risk. And if there are unpatched remotely exploitable root holes, once somebody finds it and figures out that it is vulnerable, it would probably be recompromised within minutes of being reimaged. So no, that really doesn't answer the question. :-)
I mean yes, those are good mitigation steps to limit the damage it can do, up to a point, but.... Let's put it this way, I wouldn't want it on my network... unless, of course
Re: Countdown to botnet: 3... 2... 1... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, can’t we have our nostalgia this comes from the era where the slashdot effect was a real thing.
Facepalm Moment (Score:4, Informative)
Don't link directly to the server. FFS
Here are the making-of videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:1)
As if the 15 people left on slashdot are going to overload the server.
Re: (Score:2)
is it that many?
Re: Facepalm Moment (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah. Not all at once though.
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long long long gone is the /, effect..
Re: (Score:2)
Probably 1/3 of them are sock puppets.
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They hid it behind Cloudflare (Score:3)
Re:They hid it behind Cloudflare (Score:5, Informative)
it is attached to the real internet, but the site got DDOS'd and spam'd heavily so we had to use some frontend protection
Re: (Score:2)
it is attached to the real internet, but the site got DDOS'd and spam'd heavily so we had to use some frontend protection
So, three questions on this, since you seem to be more aware of the nature of this project than the rest of us...
1.) Since the latter versions of the RaQ were just regular x86 servers, does the recovery media involve some form of DRM that prevents it from being loaded into a virtual machine and still run as a web server without the hardware?
2.) Does the RaQ support SSL at all? Obviously the website is being served via regular HTTP, but is it a server load thing, an ancient-openSSL thing, or does the RaQ not
Re: (Score:1)
does the recovery media involve some form of DRM that prevents it from being loaded into a virtual machine and still run as a web server without the hardware?
There doesn't seem to be DRM, however there isn't an easy option to use the restore CD to load the install on a generic PC or VM. The RaQ netboots from a PC running the recovery liveCD, but it is not using PXE. The RaQ has a custom firmware in place of a BIOS which does the netboot magic. There is a guy named Phintage Collector on youtube who published something on archive.org and github for how to run the RaQ software in a VM.
Does the RaQ support SSL at all? Obviously the website is being served via regular HTTP, but is it a server load thing, an ancient-openSSL thing, or does the RaQ not support HTTPs at all?
Out of the box (after restore), yes there is an SSL option on virtual sites.
pffft tiny little server (Score:2)
You need to put a real system online, like this old PDP-10 [livingcomputers.org] an old wire-wrapped backplane chunk of iron with about 400 fans. I used to joke that the Old Decsystem 10s/20s had so many fans that if you add a couple more they'd hover..
Re:pffft tiny little server (Score:4, Funny)
You need to put a real system online, like this old PDP-10 [livingcomputers.org] an old wire-wrapped backplane chunk of iron with about 400 fans. I used to joke that the Old Decsystem 10s/20s had so many fans that if you add a couple more they'd hover..
There's still one the the Internet; I saw John Travolta hacking it just last week. He got a blowjob out of it and later that night had swordfish.
However this may be a "false memory".
This is an acomplishment? (Score:2)
I have a Sun Sparc 5 I put back on the Internet a couple of years ago. It's even older (around 1994). Ran Solaris 2.58 (1997 edition) Wasn't that hard.
Ok (Score:2)
But, I don't get why anyone would care about a particular old server, or especially why anyone would care about connecting to it.
Re: (Score:2)
I am with you on this.
The thing is really not very interesting. Its a PC architecture machines striped to bear bones in terms of peripherals; that shipped with Linux an httpd (I don't recall but guessing apache 1.3.x) and some ftpd (probably vsftpd) to let you upload the sites to be hosted.
While it might have been a nice product in that it was well executed and very turn key for small shops that did not have the sysadmin talent to build out UNIX servers, and it was a good example of Linux colonizing the da
Re: Ok (Score:3)
Thr earlier ones were more exotic and interesting with their MIPS cpu.
Really? (Score:1)
case was too special (Score:2)
It oughta be illegal to make a case that won't take standard motherboards that aren't even smaller than available standard sizes. So much waste with that display and everything. I had one and I would have liked to repurpose the case since it was the only interesting part of the machine, but it would have been too much work so I scrapped it.
The Unix logo isn't spinning (Score:2)
One star.
Jesus (Score:1)