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

["Kevin Slaton" <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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
> >
> -- 


Does anyone know of about or have experience with 
Web Appliance Pro? -- http://www.ensim.com.