Does anyone have (or know where to get) a replacement power supply for a Cobalt Qube2 (later called a Sun Cobalt Qube2) ? The cupboard monster seems to have eaten mine and I want to turn the Qube2 into a NAS.
I have a Qube 2, and was also in the same situation as you for a while. I can't remember where it was, but the pinout is listed online - I can tell you this much, theres just a +12V and -12V, thats it. The third pin is not connected (Its the one that appears to be out of alignment with the other two, when looking at the plug), and just there to make the connector non-generic.
The power supplies are not easy to find (and I'm not giving mine away!), so the best thing is to hunt around a little more online, and grab a power supply from Dick Smiths, or Jaycar, or somewhere similar.
Sorry I can't help further, but somewhere out in the big wide interweb, there is indeed a site for you - I've been there before!
what I've done is a buy a 12V 5Amp PSU (so quite a bit beefier than the original) from Jaycar and placed an order for some KPPX-3P connectors from a US electronics company (Mouser.com) At the moment a paper clip is handling connector duty into the Qube2 ;-) As soon as the connectors arrive I'll have it all nice and pretty.
Machine works a treat, already ditched the original OS and it is now running NetBSD, next to cram in is a 8GB compact flash card for boot and a 500 or 750GB hardrive for data. Might actually put in a SATA board to handle the big disk and hopefully I can find a board with eSATA on the back.
Mine is running the standard OS, but I want to get rid of it, to use it as a file server (4gig ain't a file server!), but am worried about putting on another OS, as the Qube looks for boot data in a particular sector of the disk. Did you follow any install procedure when putting the new OS on? If so, can you please point me to it!
Putting on NetBSD is easy peasy! It's putting on the original OS that's a pig!
As the Qube2 doesn't have a CD drive you have to netboot it off of another computer, you can download a RestoreCD from Sun which will have the original Linux OS on it (really REALLY old version mind), you then drop that CD into a network attached PC and boot from the CD, the trouble is you must have a supported network board in that PC for the old Linux to detect ... which I don't have. Once that CD has booted, you power up the Qube2 while holding down the right and left arrow keys on the LCD until it says "Netbooting".
To install NetBSD or Debian Linux you do the exact same process, you download the equivilant RestoreCD and then netboot the Qube .... all automated after that.
Something to remember if you do it .. either have the Qube directly attached to the PC via a cross-over network cable, or discconnect your current internet router as the RestoreCD will start up a DHCP server that the Qube will be looking for ... if you have 2 DHCP servers visible on the network odd things might happen.
To get the NetBSD RestoreCD is a bit of a mission as you have to make your own by installed NetBSD on a PC and doing a whole cross compile thing ... luckily some kind soul has pre-made a current one which I'm using until I can roll my own.
If you run a more modern OS on the Qube you can make use of disks bigger than 30GB ... yup that's the limit on the original OS! so do like me, get a HUGE disk and use that, then you have an excellent fileserver/NAS/webserver/e-mail server/bittorrent/ftp/anything-else-you-like-server :-)
Edit: Oh yes I also forgot .. memory! The puny 16MB that comes with the qube2 as default is NOT going to cut it :-) I dropped in 256Mb into mine via 2 * 128MB 72pin EDO 3.3V SIMMs (doesn't everyone have a bag of these lying around ? :-) and that is the max it will take. If you like I can sell you my final 2 SIMMs ? .. and drop in a NetBSD RestoreCD as well :-)
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