Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Turn-key Web servers, Part 2 Last column I promised to delve into the Cobalt RaQ turnkey Web server. The RaQ is designed for ISPs and companies that have the need to provide virtual hosting and Web services. If all a customer wants is a single Web server, then the Cobalt Qube is a better choice (we’ll be talking about the Qube in a future column). A quick note on the differences between the RaQ and Qube: the RaQ is designed for ISPs and the Qube is designed for corporations. What’s that mean, really? For a web server for a single company or several subsidiaries of a company, along with firewall and Internet services like FTP, the Qube is the ideal product. If you want virtual hosting (providing many web servers and IP addresses from a single box), the RaQ is your box. The RaQ is available in a number of configurations, and three different versions. The latest version is the RaQ 3, with several memory and hard disk configurations possible. The bare-bones RaQ 3 has 32MB RAM, an 8.4GB IDE hard drive, and a single Ethernet connection. As you move up in memory and disk space, you can also add SCSI and dual Ethernet ports as well as a PCI slot in some models. The fully-loaded RaQ configuration sports 512MB RAM and a 20GB hard drive, and dual Ethernet. How much traffic and Web sites can the models handle? The bare-bones RaQ 3 can easily cope with 20 different medium traffic Web sites. As the number of virtual hosts increases, and the amount of traffic required by the host builds, more RAM is necessary. The disk space is required to hold the Web site contents, of course. All the RaQ 3 servers are configured with a Linux 2.2 kernel, Apache HTTP Web server, CGI support, Perl, a number of e-mail standards (SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, and APOP), FTP and anonymous FTP, telnet, and more. For Web pages, there’s Microsoft’s FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions, Java Runtime Environment, and 56-bit SSL (Secure Socket Layer). For managing the system there’s a GUI front end, SNMP, and a bunch of utilities and features. The RaQ 3 is a slim rack-mount affair finished in translucent blue plastic on the front. There’s a few buttons and a display but most of the configuration can be done through a telnet session. Installing the RaQ 3 is relatively easy: connect the Ethernet port to a network cable, connect the power, and set an IP address from the front panel controls. All that’s required is an IP address, a subnet mask, and optionally a gateway IP address, and then you can connect to the RaQ 3 using a Web browser or Telnet console. Finishing the basic configuration through a Web browser is the easiest procedure and takes only a couple of minutes. A simple check box actives some services like e-mail, FTP, and SNMP. Set the time and date, create an administrator password, and the majority of the procedures are done. I had our RaQ 3 installed and configured in under ten minutes, using the included QuickStart Guide to help with each of the necessary steps. Each virtual host configured on a RaQ 3 can have Web, FTP, and e-mail services. Up to 250 virtual hosts can be set up, although if they are anything more than single pages with only a few hits you’ll need one of the more heavily loaded (RAM and hard disk) RaQ 3 configurations. Adding a virtual site to the RaQ 3 is child’s play. Enter the host name, the IP address, and check off the services desired, and it’s done. You can toggle lots of stuff on or off, such as FrontPage Extensions (maybe you can resell the hosting for more using the Extensions, for example) and Anonymous FTP (many sites shouldn’t allow anonymous FTP as it is a potential security problem). Bandwidth limits can be set to control the traffic to a virtual site, and you can easily suspend a site temporarily (nonpayment of fees, for example). E-mail can be set up simply, allowing any number of accounts for each virtual host. There is no support for virtual e-mail users (each user must have a unique name on the RaQ 3), although redirection is fully supported. SMTP configuration is fast requiring only the names of the relay hosts. The browser interface to the RaQ 3 administration tools works remarkably well and intuitively. Even a novice to Web hosting will find the system easy to work with and a joy to use. In the next installment of this series, we’ll wrap up this look at the RaQ 3 prior to moving on to Cobalt’s Qube. If you want more information about the Cobalt products, check their Web site at www.cobalt.com. |
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