Meeting Notes: 8/18/98

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

We had a very interesting, lively, and informative meeting on the 18th of
August. The meeting came to order at 6:35. There was no new business to 
report.

Our featured speaker was Kevin Mitchell, from Iserve (a Grand Rapids ISP), 
who came with a very presentable little companion, a very compact square 
blue box known as the "Cobalt Cube"  Kevin did an excellent presentation 
on some of the functions and specs of the cube even while he was under 
the weather.  

Some specs on the Cube:  
     150 mHz RISC Processor (A MIPS, on close inspection)
     16 Mb of Memory
     2.1 GB Hard Drive
     Size: About 7 inches in each direction; it looks stackable.
     Linux OS - Some version of Red Hat, according to Kevin.
                Preconfigured Linux system; it works right away.

Interesting tradeoffs noted: 16 Mb of memory might be a bit light, but with
a fast drive and the configured 100Mb of swap space, this is not a short-
coming for lots of applications. For the memory intestive, Cubes are avail-
able with more memory, and in one larger configuration with significantly 
more "horsepower".

This is the first machine that is dedicated to Linux. No other OS is avail-
able on the Cube, nd since the Cube was announced, other hardware has hit 
the market with Linux packaged inside, but the Cube was the first.

Its interesting to note a few things at this point; there's NO VIDEO display
adapter in the Cube; its intended to be a host on a LAN, and comes with...
well, more about that in a minute!

When the Cube arrived at Iserve, it took less than 5 minutes to get up and
running.  In the back of the cube is an LCD Display that provides prompts
for 3 bits of information:

     1.  IP Address
     2.  Sub Net Mask 
     3.  Gateway IP address

Now, how do you talk to the Cube, configure it, load content and applications
onto it? There's a very complete (and darned snazzy!) configuration package
that runs via Netscape, driven by a web server (Apache) configured on the
Cube itself. Kevin walked us through this group of HTML-based toolsm and 
it does make for a very complete configuration suite indeed.

Drawback:  The warranty on the software supplied with the cube is void 
[is it?]   if you reconfigure anything outside of the supplied user 
           interface.

Features / Uses:
     1.  Very Easy to set up and run for beginners
     2.  All the Linux OS stability in easy to understand prompts.
     3.  Would be good for a first time network administrator
     4.  Portable and compact.
     5.  Good Server for companies who may want to store their server at
         their providers residence (co-location).

The Cube is easy to maintain from the company while located somewhere else,
either across the room or across the planet, due to reliance on the Web for
a user interface. 

They found 2 ways to make it crash:
     1.  Write to the LCD Panel
     2.  Play with the big glowing green light in the front.

A very compact and elegant design, quite attuned to some specific needs,
and at a price of $1249.00.. a truly commerical Linux-based product, in
high demand!

Its not clear at the moment if we're going to get additional material 
regarding this presentastion, but there's a good deal of material on the
'net regarding the Cube. A good jumping-off point is:
              http://slashdot.org/articles/9806021139226.shtml
Don't type this at home! :) Cut and paste...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Special Thanks to Brenda Smith, our new Program Director, for helping me 
with these notes by sharing some of her jottings, and for taking on the 
scheduling of our meetings. The number of meetings we have planned is 
attributable to her efforts... when she comes to recruit you to speak, 
please help all of us by sharing what you have to offer.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -