This is the first time I've ever heard someone say something negative about the Cobalt Qube. (Granted, I haven't exactly been paying rapt attention.) What are some of the problems?

-- Anonymous, December 10, 2000

Answers

• It's underpowered.
• It's partitioned in a way that makes it impossible to add any software using normal UNIX conventions for where to put things
• It's impossible to upgrade
• Most critically, it crashes dead every few days, usually when no one is in the office to restart it. Completely dead, no trace of a reason why in the logs. "Blue screen", although in the case of the Qube, we should call it "Blue Cube:)" I have never seen a UNIX box in my life that is this unreliable. I suspect it's because it's running some cheapo non-standard RISC chip instead of an Intel CPU, and Linux on that chip is not very popular or well debugged, but it could just be because the CPU is overheating and shutting itself off, or because the whole thing is badly engineered. In any case, somebody's old Gateway bought for $100 on ebay with Red Hat 6.2 would be more stable than this.
  
  -- Anonymous, December 12, 2000

The MIPS processors are hardly non-standard, but Linux had pretty immature support for them circa kernel 2.0, which is IIRC what the Qube uses.

That said, I'd be more suspicious that the problem you've got is faulty hardware, since I know from personal experience that a resonable number of hosting outfits use Qubes.

Of course, given that you hat a bunch of other stuff about it, trying to hunt down a hardware fault seems like more trouble than it's worth. If I was in NYC I'd offer you take the cool case off your hands 8).

-- Anonymous, December 13, 2000

We've got a Qube 2 with aprox 50 users, all using MS-Outlook 97. Our Qube crashed every other day, until we discovered a timing problem between Outlook and send mail. Inceasing the server timeouts in Outlook, helped. Now the Qube only crashes once a week!

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001