[geeks] Has Sun Learned from SGI's Mistakes?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

> > Since when are Cobalts Intel machines?  I thought that they ran MIPS.
> 
>   The first Cobalts...the Qube and the RaQ...were MIPS-based.  I
> beta-tested those; they were great machines.  Then Cobalt got
> suits...and they started making (rather boring) little PeeCees.

Great machines (except of being little-endian MIPS), but sucky-sucky OS.
They didn't figure out that /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/sendmail.*
should be locked during edits until the RaQ3, I believe.  Maybe they got
it in one of the last patches for the RaQ2 OS, but the original RaQ OS
would spontaneously explode if you had a lot of widget-happy users.

The also had the problem that the weblog analysis software wrote
everything to /tmp.  /tmp lives on / in the RaQs, and / is < 64MB.
Another cause for spontaneous OS explosion.

They finally got a clue in the RaQ3s (or was that the RaQ4s?) and decided
to manage everything in a PostgreSQL backend that periodically wrote the
system files from a verifiably consistent data.

We though the RaQs were great when we beta-tested them, too.  Too bad we
bought 10 or so of them. :(  At least the RaQ2 OS will run unmodified on a
RaQ, so we can get -some- of those bugs squashed without breaking the
web-interface-of-a-billion-PERL-modules.

--Jonathan