What do you all think about the Cobalt XTR

Joe

Is a good machine but quite expensive compare to Dell 1U servers. ;)

It appears to me that innovation at Cobalt has slowed down drastically if not completely come to an end.

Thanks Sun.

Drew

Well, I've read that they are pushing ahead with plans for newer models (or somethign like that). I've also read things that indicate that the server appliance market is somewhat stalled at the moment to some degree. Hard to tell since it isn't all that old, and who knows where it will be in 5 years.

I feel these "pizza boxes" are the way to go.

Drew

We've got two XTRs in our little place - we received them just after the recall/upgrade fiasco back in December. We have one that is live running sites, and one that will have sites on it soon.

We have very limited experience with hosting our own sites, so we wanted something that would be simple to purchase, setup and maintain. One of our clients owns the servers, so price wasn't a big factor for us. He had a solid budget for purchasing a couple of servers.

Bad things thus far:


the vast amount of pkg files available for RAQs are not available for XTRs, there are only 4 packages available on pkgmaster.com currently.
to upgrade PHP, it is very difficult. There are two invokations of PHP on the box. One is used for the admin control panel, one is used for the web server. If you do a normal upgrade, you will destroy your admin control panel, and have to do an OS restore (we are pretty experienced in this one) Through many of the errors we made, they have created a little instruction sheet on as a knowledgebase item if you want to learn how to do it.
I've read some other posts in the cobalt's user list of people trying to get replacement fans, I'm not sure if it was as difficult as they seemed to make it, but apparantly fans are difficult to find...
Tech support has a $100 per incident. We've used it twice - one for an issue that was their fault (we were not charged), the other time was for a software issue that was covered under an extension of the warrantee (we were not charged)


Good Things thus far:

They're really cool - works right out of the box
easy to order - I didn't need to know all the little details about what type of memory to get, or all the little choices I was given on dell.com (again, if you're an experienced net admin, then you might be more comfortable with the best configurations, etc.)
fast as hell - lots of storage space (we have the 30x4 config in a raid 5 setup... very fast and reliable)
the control panel is a bit enhanced from the RAQ4 line... I'm not sure exactly what is different, but it's pretty easy to use.


All in all, they've been great - with some hiccups that have been pretty stressful, but able to be dealt with.

I really want to buy a Raq XTR but I can't find a way to test their users admin interface.
On their website Cobalt has a demo for the server admin and the site admin but not for the user admin web interface.

I know that it is different from the Raq 3 and 4.

Is there a demo somewhere where I could login and test it?
Or could someone with a Raq XTR set me a temp username so that I could look at the interface for my self, especially I wan to test the webmail function and features.


Thanks