RE: [cobalt-users] Alternatives to SUN Cobalts

["Rick Ewart" <cobalt@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I would go to Linux in a heart beat. The great feature that 
> Cobalt had that 
> is missing in a Linux/UNIX solution, is the individual 
> management for many 
> domains on one box.  I am in a school setting and have many smaller 
> district that do not have the technical staff and can not 
> afford to do it 
> on their own. Having one server, many domains, and each with 
> the ability to 
> do the adds/changes/deletes was a prefect solution.
> I really need to ability to let each domain have the ability to 
> administrate there own domain without having access to all the others.

Jason - 

Take a look at ensim.com. Their WebAppliance for Linux is pretty decent
and pretty inexpensive. Essentially you take any "normal" PC and turn it
into a webappliance. I have a couple of them running and it seems to
work pretty well. I would buy more of them before thinking about Cobalt
again. Your box can be "off the shelf" if nothing else - no searching
for little fans that only 2 people in the world sell. :)

There is a good support group at rackshack for them too.

Re: their patches and updates, they seem ok - response is commensurate
with the danger, it seems.

More importantly, they have only a 1/2 dozen things you cannot patch
yourself. Most/many things can use the standard RedHat rpms. Even for
the specialized ones, there are some guys at RackShack (gpan for
example) who regularly builds patches that install without breaking the
GUIs.

One thing that is really nice is the reseller control panel - lets you
assing X # of domains, disk space, bandwidth to a reseller and he can
setup his own sites - even sets up the DNS entries.

HTH.
Rick