Flashes of Panic

Back in my old job, I worked a lot with an obsolete all-in-one “server appliance” called a Cobalt Qube. It was a handy little thing: gateway, firewall, mail server, web server and file server all in one. It would’ve handled DNS and FTP if we’d asked (or, more correctly, if I’d thought those were a good idea; I didn’t.)

In today’s NYT there’s a squib about a box called the Chili Box. Pardon me, but it gave me chills. It’s the Qube all over—not literally, but in all the important ways. Custom hardware, complete with a colorful case and very few buttons. Web interface. Firewall, network gateway, file sharing, mail server and web proxy all in one cute little case. The ‘net has changed in the last five or six years, so the web server is gone (who hosts their own website in their office anymore?) and the firewall is bumped to the top of the list; spam filtering is built in instead of installed aftermarket by a painstaking sysadmin.

And I’m betting there’s a custom flavor of Linux in there waving the baton. I wonder how long Chili Networks will be dealing out security updates? If they’ll actually increment version numbers on the updated daemons, instead of back-porting patches like Cobalt and Sun did? If they’ll update the kernel at all? Because I bet there will be some enterprising home-grown sysadmins out there who will take those nice, economical Chili Boxes and keep them running much, much longer than Chili Networks think they’ll be supporting them.

They’re cute, though. I wonder if they’re quiet enough to sit in the living room next to the cable modem?

Now Playing: Under The Milky Way from El Momento Descuidado by The Church