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Showing posts from February, 2010

The story of the Cobalt Qube

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The other week, a friendly colleague of mine brought me a small present. He gave me one of his Cobalt Qube s (for free!) which was collecting dust at his home. He was certain that I could give it a better use. I think I can still remember the days these things hit the market (somewhere in the late 90's). This was a home / office server appliance way before the people of Microsoft thought up their Windows Home Server . It was running some modified version of Linux RedHat, featuring a web interface for all administrative tasks. It also had 2 network cards, so you could easily turn it into a gateway / firewall. The RedHat version running on the Qube was known to be notoriously insecure. It was also running an older 2.0.x kernel which was outdated, even at that time. The Qube 2700 and Qube 2 were both equipped with a MIPS processor. Later models had an i386 architecture. Mine was a Qube 2. Getting the serial connection to work The Qube does not have any VGA adapter, so if you want to s