Move Over Mini-ITX, Here Comes The gigaQube

Jim Ethanol writes "Since there's been a lot of interest lately in Mini ITX based servers I thought the Slashdot crowd might enjoy checking out Project gigaQube. The gigaQube is a modified Cobalt Qube 2 server appliance with 240 Gigabytes of storage running NetBSD's Mips R5000 based Cobalt port. Cobalt Qube's are quiet, cool looking little (7.25 x 7.25 x 7.75 inch) servers that when modified, make a powerful home server solution. They also seem to have achieved 'fetish' status in Japan. See some gigaQube action shots here, or check its vitals here."

but

[Anonymous Coward]

do they run solaris?

Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone tell me why this is news? It's not like anything super-duper was done, he just added some storage and RAM.

I think this line from the page:

Shortly after receiving and playing with the Qubes, I named them Pamela.Anderson & Keanu.Reeves because they looked pretty

Is more interesting then the project itself.

Fortress of Insanity [homeunix.org]
Blogzine [blogzine.net]

Re:Not enough RAM

[wyndigo]

Obviously you don't use NetBSD. I have my primary mail/file/firewall/web/zope server at home running on a celeron 300a with 128M of ram, and it is zippy as can be.

I know this is the age of ever growing ram usage, but for a lot of things it isn't really needed. You can go a remarkably long way on 128M of ram. In fact, my machine never even swaps.

--wyn

Re:Mail server? Web Server?

[freyr]

Uhh. Is this a trick question? Of course you can run an SMTP server or web server on NetBSD.

wire unions?

[the_2nd_coming]

this guy is using electrical tape to wire up his new PS to the old cobalt plug. how stupid is this guy? there are more safe and reliable ways to bring two pieces of wire together than that...5 minutes at home depot would tell you that.

Why should Mini-ITX move over?

[iamhassi]

Perhaps I don't understand: this old server costs a few hundred bucks for ~200mhz w/ 16megs & 10gigs [ebay.com], hasn't been made in years so you can't find parts for it (a problem when the power supply goes bad [shon.org]), uses ancient, 60ns (read slow) 72pin memory [crucial.com], and adding a second drive requires "ty-wraps, bubble wrap and double stick tape" [shon.org], but this is going to replace Mini-ITX?

I enjoy hacking systems as much as the next guy, but when I can get something much better for much less and it's more reliable (no bubble wrap), I don't see the point.

So please, someone explain why the Qube is so great compared to Mini-ITX systems because I fail to see the advantages.