Oh boy

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to setup a Cobalt Qube behind a cable modem for someone else in my company. We figured it was for some testing purposes but weren't really sure what.

Today I touched base with the person who requested the Qube and found out that she wanted to use it for generating usage reports for senior management.

WTF?!?!?

I explained to her that:

1. Sun end-of-lifed the box a year or two ago and in the event of hardware failure, we'd be pretty much SOL.
2. Since it was directly hooked up to a cable modem, it wasn't exactly secure.
3. Security patches for Cobalt OS aren't likely to be forthcoming from Sun for much longer.

I suggested she talk to IT and see about getting an appropriate solution, and she agreed with me that taking the Qube offline was the best course of action.

From now on if someone comes to us with a request to setup a box, I'm going to find out its intended use, and not rely on anybody's good judgement but mine!