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

["Ligard, Vidar" <vligard@xxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg Hewitt-Long [mailto:cobaltusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 11:31 AM
> To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [cobalt-users] Re: Future of Cobalt
> 
> 
> >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???

Wouldn't this be possible even with a standard RedHat box or any other *nix and simply install the necessary rpm packages from the cobalt distribution?
We'd need the postgressql backend and the gui (sausalito/admserv) frontend rpm's
It seems that this should work with very few if any modifications, since all the config files the gui is reading / writing to are standard config files in the standard places.
Any thoughts??

> 
> regards
> 
> Greg Hewitt-Long
> 
> 
> >Thom
> >
> -- 
> http://www.webyourbusiness.com/
> Providers of E-Commerce Software &
> Web Design Consultancy and Services.
> PH: (970) 266-0195   FAX: (970) 266-0158
> 
> _____________________________________
> cobalt-users mailing list
> cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To subscribe/unsubscribe, or to SEARCH THE ARCHIVES, go to: 
> http://list.cobalt.com/mailman/listinfo/cobalt> -users
>