RE: [cobalt-users] the GUI interface

[Brent Sims <brent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Dan so wrote:

} Of course they don't say that "remote" also includes Telnet while they make
} it appear that it's all through the browser. Ain't those marketing droids
} wonderful?

	We installed our first Cobalt's last Monday. I subscribed to
this list that very day as I've long found list's such as these to
be quite helpful.

	But it isn't like we are rookies.

	Being a geek who started playing with the stuff back in the
days when the only OS you could run was the OS you wrote yourself,
Cobalt's RaQ's are the last server that the likes of me would ever
buy. By the same token, as the owner of a successful web hosting
business I keep kicking myself in the butt for not buying them
sooner.

	What Cobalt's do they do very well. They've opened up a
whole new market for us and the amount of business they are
generating for us is much more than expected. We're already thinking
of buying more of them. The people I buy my toys from have other
systems, virtually all of which the geek in me considers to be far
superior to the Cobalts, but the Cobalts are making me money simply
because - as I see it - Cobalt has done the marketing to the end
users for us.

	As a frequent and long-time contributor to many Linux lists
I can say with absolute certainty that a substantial portion of the
messages I see from this list would result in the poster being
flamed rather badly at most of the places where the likes of me hang
out. No insult intended or implied, I'm just trying to point out
that a large percentage of people on this list who claim to running
successful hosting businesses and/or hosting your own probably
couldn't even figure out how to boot our other servers yet the
complaints about the limitations of the Cobalt's keep on flowing.

	Yesterday afternoon, someone contacted me via ICQ asking for
assistance building a secure HTTPD for their brand new Red Hat 6.2
powered server. To make a long story short, after determining that
they had absolutely no idea whatsoever of what they were doing, I
suggested that they either purchase the Professional Version of Red
Hat - which comes with a legally licensed secure server - or that
they ask their provider to switch them over to a Cobalt as they
could then easily add a secure server for a hundred bucks if the
provider's Cobalt's didn't come with them. Their response threw me
for a loop: "I already have four Cobalts running..."

	I don't know what this person was doing with those four
Cobalts but I'm thinking they were doing a bit more than hosting
their personal web site and I'm hoping that my assistance will make
it possible for them to successfully type rpm -i <file_name> so they
can install the secure server that resides on the CD they had
purchased from Red Hat.
		
	As a geek I hate our new Cobalts. But we didn't buy them for
the geek in me, nor did we buy them for our geek clients. We bought
them for the 24 people who came aboard this week simply because we
took advantage of what Cobalt's "marketing droids" did so very well:

	They created a huge market for servers that my mother could
administer.

	It doesn't get any better than this... period. 

	Peace be with you,
	
	Brent
	
	Brent Sims
	WebOkay Internet Services
	http://www.WebOkay.net
	Brent@xxxxxxxxxxx
	(719) 595-1427 (Voice/Fax)