BlueOnyx

BlueOnyx is the next generation of BlueQuartz?. It is an Open-Source administration interface for virtual webservers, designed to run on the latest version of CentOS. Which - at the time of the writing of this article is CentOS v5.2. It provides an intuitive GUI interface to administer most of the day to day tasks of server administration. Such as creating sites and users, managing web-, email-, FTP-, DNS- and other services.

BlueOnyx can trace its heritage back to the following Open-Source and commercial products:

Sun Cobalt RaQ550

Developed by Cobalt Networks, Inc. the RaQ550 was - at the time of the dot.com boom - an inexpensive, but powerful 1U server appliance with an easy to use GUI. After Cobalt Networks, Inc. was bought up by Sun Microsystems, Inc. the entire line of Sun Cobalt RaQ's and Qube's was EOL'ed in 2003 without replacement.

In August 2003 the Source-Code of the RaQ550 OS was released as Open-Source under a Sun modified BSD license.

BlueQuartz?

After the release of the Qube3 and RaQ550 Source-Code 'Team BlueQuartz?' picked up the pieces and ported the GUI to different Linux platforms - eventually settling for CentOS v4. BlueQuartz? added a lot of improvements and fixes to the original code.

Turbolinux Appliance Server 2.0

The leader of 'Project BlueQuartz?' also worked for the Japanese Linux Vendor Turbolinux, Inc. and for them he developed the Turbolinux Appliance Server 2.0. Partially this was based on the original RaQ550 code and partially on BlueQuartz? code. Both BlueQuartz? and TLAS 2.0 heavily influenced each other. However, this was not unproblematic, as BlueQuartz? was available free of charge and was often more modern than the commercial USD 950.- priced TLAS 2.0.

Development of BlueOnyx

As team members 'Project BlueQuartz?' Brian N. Smith of NuOnce? Networks, Inc. and Michael Stauber of Solarspeed Ltd. started porting BlueQuartz? to CentOS 5.1 at the end of 2007. However, after about three months all progress came to a standstill due to inner workings of 'Project BlueQuartz?' and long phases of inactivity from key people inside the project. In the meantime much effort went into improving the code base of the CentOS 4 based BlueQuartz?.

Brian N. Smith of NuOnce? Networks, Inc. and Michael Stauber of Solarspeed Ltd. provided a magnitude of updates and improvements free of charge to 'Project BlueQuartz?'. But almost none of these were released officially by the project leaders, nor was there any real commitment from key people inside 'Project BlueQuartz?' to help with the porting of BlueQuartz? to CentOS 5.

We have a lot of gratitude and respect for 'Project BlueQuartz?' and acknowledge that without their achievements over the years we wouldn't be where we are now. However, in November 2008 this situation became unbearable for us and we decided to take matters in our own hands.

Based on the 5100R code tree of BlueQuartz? (which is for CentOS4) and our experimental 5106R code tree (which is for CentOS 5) we started to create BlueOnyx.

At first we merged all the unreleased improvements from the 5100R code tree into the 5106R tree. After resolving the last major and minor transitional errors we then started to improve and to extend the resulting code with new features. Such as the now built in Java Servlet Pages support, the improved PHP security, the MySQL management and other things.

At the moment we're pressing hard for a release of BlueOnyx near the end of December 2008.

BlueOnyx will be Open Source, available free of charge and community supported. However, commercial support and commercial add-on software will also be available from NuOnce? Networks, Inc. and Solarspeed Ltd.