[cobalt-developers] New person questions, re: "Manufacturing" appliances with Cobalts

["Alan J Sonnenberg" <alan.sonnenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello-

I am new to the Cobalt environment and am doing my best to come up to speed and could use any  assistance available. We are deploying a new product on the Cobalt RaQ550 and I have been tasked with doing simple ;) provisioning things such as:

. Building a custom OSRCD
. creating our package(s)
. building an architecture for our own package update system using the BlueLinQ technology


I just have a "simple issue" to which your answer may help me shed light on bigger issues. In addition I have a few broader questions, which I would really appreciate your expertise. 

<Simple issue> 
I created an RPM for our application and grouped it with several other rpms required by our application. I set out yesterday to create our package. Documentation looks pretty straight forward, but I was concerned because all of my documents are about the RAQ3/4. 
So being the curious type I downloaded a package from the Cobalt site: ftp://ftp.cobalt.com/pub/packages/raq550/all/RaQ550-All-Security-0.0.1-14934.pkg

What I do not understand is why this file is NOT a compressed gzip file? I thought I should be able to untar, look at packing list, etc. and then apply that expertise to my .pkg file. I download any package from the packages/raq4 and they are all gzip compressed data. Insight?

</Simple Issue>

To further my level of confusion, I also have a document by Sun titled "The Qube 3 Software Architecture Developer's Guide, V1.0". This document seems totally different for building packages, but looks more appropriate for the RAQ550. I will take any pointers along the following lines....

Where do I find documentation for the RAQ550? I have heard that I should use Cube3 or RaQ3/4 documents?
What document can I use to architect a BluelinQ server of my own? It is our thinking to QA Cobalt patches first before release to our customer and our customer would point to our update server.

Thanks,
Alan