Does The Cobalt Live up to its Claim?

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Introduction
Beginning with the RaQ3 series of servers from Cobalt, Chili!Soft’s ASP engine has been available. By combining the simplicity of the Cobalt hardware with Chili!Soft’s engine, allowed Cobalt to create the tagline “Develop on NT, Deploy on Cobalt”. With the relatively low cost of the Cobalt, the fact it runs Linux, and is optimized to be a web server, I just had to check it out. The thought of taking a complete ASP driven web site and having it run on efficient hardware/OS platform was a real selling point. I set out to answer the following questions:

1. How many modifications to code would be needed to make a site run properly?

2. Would there be any additional costs involved?

3. Would the Cobalt server pages as fast or faster than a similarly priced PC?

I armed myself with a RaQ3 unit and set out to do some testing. As some of you know from previous articles, I run a small amateur rocketry website that is all ASP pages and uses some SQL Server and Access 2000 files. In a recent article, I began converting this data to MySQL under Windows 2000.
I thought trying to move the WildRocketry site would be a pretty good test case because of the mixed databases, and tons of custom coding that went into the project.

Getting Started

With the RaQ3, the Chili!Soft engine is an add-on that will run an additional $795.00. On the newer RaQ4, Chili!Soft is included in the price of the server. To install Chili!Soft on the RaQ3 requires server admin level access, you get the .rpm file directly from Cobalt and with their instructions, installation only takes a few minutes. With the RaQ4, the Chili!Soft configuration is built into the web-based administration and for each website is simply a checkbox that says “Enable ASP pages?”.

So far, getting MySQL running was no problem, getting the data imported was not a major deal. Finally, using the web-based control panel, I created a data source to the MySQL tables so that Chili!Soft could now work. This is where my first real issue came into play. It seemed that nothing I did would make my ASP pages recognize the data source name. I scoured newsgroups, I poured over message archives, re-read FAQ’s and found nothing. On a whim, I tried experimenting with case sensitivity, sure enough, that was the problem all along. By changing the case of the data source in the control panel and in the ASP pages to all lower-case, my pages magically started working. This would have been nice to see this is a FAQ at either Cobalt or Chili!Soft’s website.

Problem solved, it was time to start testing everything. The pages displayed fast, the database access was much faster than the old Access files. Then I tried the feedback form that uses the CDO component, this did not work either.

Fortunately, this one was easy to find, but more difficult to fix. In order to be able to use SMTP email, you need to purchase the Chili!Soft add-on package called SpicePack which runs an additional $249.00. Besides SMTP email, SpicePack also gives you these other features:

Chili!POP3 1.0: POP3 (Post Office Protocol) COM object used to retrieve email from a mail server, using the same protocol used by most email clients.

Chili!Upload 1.0: Used to upload files from a client (typically a Web browser) to the server and then save these files to the server’s file system.

Summary

Does the Cobalt live up to its tagline of “Develop on Windows, Deploy on Cobalt”? The answer is, it depends. If you needs are pretty simple and you don’t need additional IIS components, then this may actually work for you. The response times when using ASP pages hooked into the MySQL database were very fast, the server has been very reliable and extremely stable. I give the Cobalt high points on speed, stability and ease of use, and a few low points on advanced support issues. I believe the support is being resolved. With Sun Microsystems recent purchase of Cobalt, the distribution and support systems will be pulled into Sun’s existing infrastructure. This will be a huge boon to Cobalt users.

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