RE: [cobalt-users] Re: Future of Cobalt

[Greg Hewitt-Long <cobaltusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Kevin Slaton wrote:
>
>> I guess the only other way for sun to get the message is when they erode
>> their customer base away enough that it starts to hit their pocket books.
>
>But I think we lowly Server Appliance folks need to realize that as soon
>as Sun decided NOT to go after that market place(Maytag Servers), we all
>were no longer customers.
>
>We're in a niche that Sun doesn't want, and a lot of us are hoping someone
>will step up to the plate and woo us.
>
>So, instead of debating Sun's policy/motivatio/vision we need to begin
>planning what we'll do when the products now longer have any
>support....and I don't think we can count on the VARs for help, since
>VAR in the Cobalt sense may have been the same as distributor.


I think you need to be aware that most cobalt "vars" *were* distributors, or simply "box shifters" - all of our original systems came from a "True Blue" partner, who wanted nothing but to sell you a box and a charge $200 per hour for support - their "support" was negligible, and knew less than I did about the blue boxes themselves - I was NOT going to pay $200 to tell some fool how telnet wouldn't work because it was disabled and replaced with SSH!

FWIW - our "reseller" ditched Cobalts as soon as Sun came on the scene - they now offer IBM boxes - and I see now reason to purchase them - they cost the same a Cobalt did, but without the GUI?!?!

I'm sure there were good vars, but we just wanted a cheap box - the best support available was from the community HERE - the fact that we had a web based GUI for non-technical users to manage their accounts (and for some of our less than unix savvy staff to add/manage accounts) was definitely a plus, but I'm rapidly coming round to thinking that we need basically a low cost replacement to CPanel that will work on almost any Linux/BSD/Debian style *nix - the version of *nix is almost irrelevant, as long as we have a decent perl, MySQL, PHP and apache installation to play with.  It would be nice to have a webhostingmanger style implementation to enable resellers to manage their space/domains/sub-domains themselves, but other than that - we just need the tools to manage the machines - it's control panel thing.

I honestly don't think Sun is the answer - IBM doesn't have anything close, Dell's *nix boxes are in the same boat, and the solutions look pretty much like they are Plesk or CPanel at the moment - but at $1500 per server licence fees, that's NOT a great option.  Does anyone know of a GPL or similarly licensed, even a low cost licensed control panel that does this?

While it would be nice to have a hardware platform standardized, I'm not entirely convinced that it's necessary - surely some group somewhere can cobble together the tools using MySQL/PHP and generate a worth control panel at less than a couple of hundred a licence...  any takers???

regards

Greg Hewitt-Long


>Thom
>
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