Sun Cobalt Qube

» see cobalt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the qube showed up in my world around '00 as a photo in pc magazine and on the inside of a sysadmin forum thread. i was sixteen, on a 33.6k ttnet line at home, just getting into linux on a beige tower in the corner of my bedroom. the qube was the opposite of that. it was the small blue cube on the desk of someone who already knew what they were doing and did not want to spend a weekend installing apache.

cobalt networks had been founded in '96 by mark orr and vivek mehra with the pitch that small business servers should not look like beige towers. the first cobalt qube shipped in march '98. it was a 7-inch blue plastic cube, mips processor, a small green led, an ethernet port on the back, no monitor or keyboard. you plugged in a cable, you opened your browser to an address printed on the bottom, you ran through a setup wizard. fifteen minutes later you had a working web server with file shares and an smtp box running on the side.

back then. the qube ran a hardened red hat linux with a web-based admin panel that cobalt had built in house. that admin panel is the part everyone remembers. it was a clean, json-driven dashboard six years before everyone called that pattern web 2.0. the admin pane handled users, dns, virtual hosts, backups. it did all of that without dropping you into a shell once.

i was watching from a distance. cobalt did the rare thing in the late dot-com era of actually shipping a hardware business that made money. they ipo'd in november '99 at a $1.3 billion valuation. sun microsystems acquired them in a stock deal announced september 19 2000 valued at about $2 billion. the close went through on december 7 '00. sun kept the cobalt brand and the qube line, then shipped a qube 3 in '02. by '03 sun had decided server appliances did not fit the sparc-and-solaris story. the cobalt line was discontinued at the end of '03 and the team was dissolved.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

this part i had to look up. the qube was technically three machines across its life. the qube 2700 in '98 ran a 150mhz RM5230 mips chip with 16mb of ram. the qube 2 in '00 doubled the cpu and gave it gigabit ethernet. the qube 3 in '02 jumped to an amd k6-2 at 300 or 450mhz and added a second drive bay. the os was always a customized red hat linux. cobalt also shipped the raq, a rackmount version of the same software, which sold harder into the isp colo market than the qube did into smb.

~ the admin panel ~

the admin panel was called bluelinq and it was the secret of the box. it was written in perl and ran on top of apache, with a database backend that tracked every setting the device exposed. you added a virtual host through the web ui, the panel rewrote your apache config and reloaded the daemon. you added a user, it provisioned a shell account plus a mail directory in one operation, with ftp access ready behind the same login. the qube was an early example of the idea that infrastructure could be a saas-style interface on top of a linux box. red hat would copy parts of that idea in cockpit a decade later, plesk and cpanel had already been doing parts of it on rented hosting. cobalt got the desk-cube form right first.

~ what really happened ~

sun had bought cobalt in late '00 for the same reason it bought storagetek and forte. it wanted a complete server stack. by '02 the market the cobalt was built for was eroding. the small business that had bought a qube in '99 was now renting a virtual server from a shared hosting company for $20 a month. the colo that had bought a rack of raqs was now buying blade servers. sun discontinued the cobalt line in december '03 and folded what was left of the team into the n1 systems group. the bluelinq admin panel was open-sourced under the bluelinq foundation, where it kept getting minor patches through '06 before stopping.

the blue cube sits in a few computer museums now. a small number of qubes are still running on lan corners in dental offices and small print shops, mostly because nobody has bothered to turn them off. the box was solid hardware and the os was simple enough to outlive its maker by twenty years.

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