What's small, cheap, and serves up an Internet connection that your Mom could configure? Don't know? Well, I can tell you, it's the Cobalt Qube 2, the coolest blue cube you'll ever see.
January 17, 2000
The Qube 2 is a great choice for any home office, small office looking to get down to some serious file sharing, or for those looking to get started with an inexpensive, yet solid web serving platform. For $999, you get a small blue cube packed with a customized version of the Linux OS, two ethernet cards, a web server, file serving capabilities, an email server, and the easiest to use administration toolkit I've seen in a long time.
Out of the box, the Qube 2 is almost ready to roll. Plug it into your router or network connection and power it up. Alternatively, if you're going to use it to share a dial-up Internet connection, there's a built in serial port for an external modem.
Once the Qube 2 is powered up, basic network settings (gateway, IP address, etc.) are entered via an LCD on the backpanel of the box. While I was a tad annoyed by the small buttons (a numeric keypad would've been more my style), it still gets the job done.
After basic configuration and boot up, the administration tools are accessed through a web interface. All the utilities an admin could need are available through the interface. Network , web server, mail, ftp, document sharing and other configurations are all available in a nice point and click environment. If you're feeling particularly techie, and have a knack with Linux, you can telnet in and manually edit the files through a command line interface. I found it interesting that whenever you login through telnet you get a legal warning from Cobalt that you're just a few steps away from voiding your warranty. Actually, they don't say that, but there are stern warnings about messing with settings that you'll find yourself paying for support to fix (or at least that's insinuated).
While testing the telnet capabilities of the Qube 2, I found that some of the security settings are a bit buried in the administration tools. I had a bit of a time figuring out how to enable the telnet server, but a quick email to tech support (answered in 1/2 hour, which is good in my book) fixed the issue (I just didn't know where to look).
The Qube 2 offers quite a few features for the small office/home office user including:
· web serving
· pop3, smtp, IMAP email services
· firewall
· FTP
· Mailing lists
· NAT
· DHCP
· DNS
· Internet connection sharing via modem or network
After about a month of running the Qube 2 through its paces, I decided to see if I could duplicate the little guy's capabilities on a plain old Linux server. So I fired up a Pentium 100 with 32 MB of RAM and a copy of Redhat Linux 6.0 and set about to building my own knock-off cube.
I failed…miserably. Now I consider myself pretty savvy with Linux, having used it for the past three years and having setup some servers in my time. Still, I just couldn't easily duplicate the Qube 2. Why?
First there's DNS and DHCP. If you're not a real techie, trying to configure Linux to handle these services is downright painful. I spent the better part of two weeks on mailing lists, how-to documents, and manual pages working on these two features. By the time I finished with them, they "kind of" worked, in that they actually worked, but to this day I'm sure I couldn't hope to get them working again if they died on me.
When it came to web serving, that was easy, I had Apache setup in no time flat. FTP was the same way. Of course, all of this was done through the command line, whereas it's done via a nice web-based GUI on the Qube 2.
Mailing lists and email services were, well, ok, I cheated. After working with SendMail (ghastly configuration if you ask me), I grabbed a copy of Communigate Pro from Stalker Software. Communigate provided all the services I needed, and had web-based mailboxes and configuration tools. But it's not a free application, so I don't think this was a fair fight.
Firewalling and NAT (Network Address Translation) are a part of the core of Linux, so they came free with the OS. Configuring them took another week and a half of learning on my part. But it works, and I'm pretty confident with it, take that Mr. Qube.
Internet connection sharing. Oh good Lord, this was painful beyond imagining. I seriously can't believe what a pain this can be to setup in Linux. I managed to get the connections to be shared so that if the modem on the server was already connected to the Internet, all the other PC's on the network shared that connection. However, I could not for the life of me get the server to automatically dial the Internet whenever a client PC made a request for a web page, email, or any Internet resource. The Qube 2 on the other hand "automagically" dials the Internet (if it's not already connected) when someone needs to connect to an Internet resource. I scoured the Internet and various user groups (and canvassed friends) for help on configuring this, but got nowhere. I finally cheated and copied the configuration files from the Qube 2 to my Linux "Cube-clone" and got it working.
So in sum, here are the trade-offs:
Solution 1: Buy a Qube 2
$999 and about 15 minutes of your time.
Solution 2:Build your own Linux box (or FreeBSD box)
$Cost of server and about 60 years of your life. Just kidding ! It actually took me the better part of a month to configure the Linux box to do what the Qube 2 did. Surely a highly experienced sysadmin could do this quickly, but how many small offices can afford to have one of those guys around ?
Solution 3: Build an NT box to do this
$We're just not going to go there For everything the Qube 2 does, you will end up paying a few thousand dollars to get running on Windows NT (the OS, Microsoft Exchange Server, Proxy Server, etc.). And keeping a system like that running stable on NT will be a serious time investment since normally you'd have an NT server for each service, not all of them packed onto one server.
To sum it up, the Qube 2 is a great tool for the small office or home office that's in need of Internet access and file sharing. If you need a small web serving platform and won't be doing anything too fancy, the Qube 2 is also a great idea. The administration is quick and easy, as is maintenance. I rebooted mine once over a two month test period!
And if you're wondering, "Cube-clone" is now scrap parts in my basement, whereas I'm still trying to convince Cobalt to let me keep the real Qube 2.
Ted Brockwood is the Information Services Manager for a real estate listing service in Oregon. His experience covers Java, Linux, UNIX, NT, Win95/98, Win3.x, and DOS.
