Cobalt Raq's are the biggest pieces of shit1 I've used in a long time. I used to think they were really neat, now I've used one. Of course part of this is just bitterness from having to learn yet another non-standard persons idea of how Unix should work. Ugg.
These notes are what work for me on the preconfigured Cobalt that we get from our ISP. They may not necessarily be standard. -- AdamShand
Homepage
Their homepage is basically useless as far as I've been able to tell. They have some software you can download but mostly it's bundled packages which update a whole bunch of stuff in one fell swoop.
Resources
There are actually some halfway decent places where the Cobalt's are supported by the user community fairly well, including providing actually useful 3rd party packages.
http://www.cobalt.com/support/resources/index.html (The official support site)
http://pkgmaster.com/ (The best source of 3rd party packages I could find)
http://cobalt-aid.sourceforge.net/ (An okay source of information and packages)
http://cobalt-aid2.lindist.dk/ (The new cobalt-aid site)
General Information
You manage them via the web interface at http://site.domain.com/admin/
- You can telnet/ssh to them a using the same username/password as for the web interface. You can su to root using the same password.
- Cobalt packages use the .pkg format which is really just tar.gz.
- Often the packages have RPM's inside of them.
- To install a package go to the web interface and click "Maintenance" and then "Install Software".
- To uninstall a package go to /var/lib/cobalt/uninstallers and look for a script whose name matches the name of the package you want to remove, run it to remove it (intuitive huh?).
Weirder Stuff
So my first task was installing a useful web stats program, in the processof figuring out how this worked I broke a bunch of shit. In the end I discovered that this is how it works.
- It uses one log file (/var/log/httpd/access) for all the virtual hosts that exist on the Cobalt, I can't fathom why but someone seemed to think it was a good idea.
- Because of that it uses a non-standard version of the combined web log format, this makes installing a non-standard stats generator a total bitch.
The format it uses is almost standard, except that for the very first it inserts the name of the virtual host that the query went to.
- Some mysterious script (that I have yet to trackdown) parses the access file every night, uses that stupid non-standard first field and creates a standard compliant log file for each virtual host in /home/sites/*/logs/web.log.
1 "I freely admit that many of my problems would have been much clearer and less painful to solve had I spent the time to RTFM beforehand. In the meantime please indulge my bitterness.