Rack it Up! Poking Around
on the Cobalt RaQ4
By Bob Kaehms
In my review, "Two Cobalts Working in Concert," in the November 2000 issue of Web Techniques, I described the weakness of the RaQ3I failover implementation, not because it didn't work or wasn't easy to set up, but because I'm cheap, and hate to see a completely idle machine. Since then I've bought a RaQ4, because I believe the Cobalt products to be excellent. I poked around inside my RaQ4; hopefully, some of my musings and insight will help you decide whether to buy or build your own Linux 1U server.
First, if the downfall of the RaQ3I was failover idle-time, then the problem with the RaQ4 is the database it ships with—InterBase. It's Borland's open source SQL database. I don't say this to knock the InterBase product, as it looks really good, but no one I've run into in Cobalt support or in the user groups seems to know how to use the product. The ChiliSoft ODBC driver didn't make it into the release that shipped to me, but it's available for download now.
Lucky for me, support at Cobalt is friendly and reliable. I got in touch with Pierre Reynes, marketing manager at Cobalt, who brought me up to date on future RaQ releases. He assured me that the ODBC driver would be in the next release, that I could download it now, and that MySQL would also be included as a standard package with the next RaQ4. Then he sent me some simple instructions for downloading the most recent version of MySQL from Cobalt. It took all of five minutes to install and test. I won't bore you with details.
