RAQCOP = IPCop + Cobalt Raq, Cobalt Raq Firewall Applicance Software, Velociraptor Software Upgrade.

No, there was never a Velociraptor based on the 550. The Velociraptor 500 through 1100 are Raq4 based. The 550 (one of the two 5000 series) was actually made by Sun themselves after they acquired Cobalt Networks and before they discontinued the line. It differs from the Raq3/4 in many ways. It is two inches deeper in chassis depth, there are separate leds for two nics and two drives. 3.5" drives plug into the edge of the motherboard directly with no connectors or ribbons needed. It is a Pentium III Coppermine and uses ECC memory and will take a few gigs of ram with ease. The lcd is still the same 16x2 HD44780 compatible connected via parallel at port 0x378. The rom is 2MB Flat, not paged. These likely had two drives by default and resetting the rom defaults root and boot to /dev/md0. The drawback is that they have two 40x28 fans near the front of the case spinning at 11000 rpm at least and the power supply has a oddball 38x28mm fan in it that spins awfully high as well. I replaced my three fans with 5500 rpm versions of the same model and it quieted it down to the same or slightly less noise that the Raq3/4 but it does not run as cool as the earlier raqs. I'm guessing about 50 or so C. One of mine is a less common model that came standard with a 1266mhz processor rather than 1000. The front side bus is 133, not 100 on all of these. These also use a different sensor chip than all the others including the XTR and the temp portion does not work in either the current 2.3.10 rom kernel nor any 2.6 kernel with the cobalt drivers patched in. The fans are three wire with a tachometer. The same driver actually DOES read the fan rpm and cpu voltages but no temp.

The XTR, the other and first of the 5000 series, by far makes the best file server of any cobalts but it is huge at 26" deep. It has four hot swap trays behind the folding front panel. These are also Pentium III based but came in either 850mhz or 1000, I have one of each and use them for file serving only running Centos 5.5 and my special Cobalt patched 2.6.35 kernel as of now. These also use ECC ram but there are four slots. There is also a second CPU socket but Cobalt networks never could get stable operation from two cpu's so the second socket has a dummy cpu load in it and the rom was never developed for SMP. The XTR shares the same sensor chip as the 3000 series but uses more of it. Fan rpm (six fans), chassis temp, and cpu temp all work with the Cobalt sensor driver. The rom chip and rom image is exactly the same as the 3000 series although I don't think they varied in vendor so much. The rom kernel simply has all the drivers it needs for either the 3000 series or the XTR in the image much like I compile my kernels for raqcop to be able to run any model. The only penalty by having both generations in one kernel image is a few K of memory. Symantec Velociraptor models 1300 and many beyond are based on this but they only use one drive tray. I still can't believe they used the XTR for a Gateway appliance and did for years! The first drive tray is actually dev/hde. I think the only reason they got this is because they had an arrangement with Cobalt Networks before the Sun Acquisition. The 550 would have been the logical successor to the 500-1100 VR series but Sun probably did not want them to have it. Oh, and the 16x2 lcd is i2c bus driven, not parallel and is much much smaller than the display on the others, about half the size of a postage stamp. It's entirely too small. No matter, mine run as a server in a closet out of sight.

Both the 550 and XTR have PCI-X slots that are 64 bit. Using a Dual gigabit Intel nic in lieu of the two buit in National Semiconductor 10/100's for my server has helped a freat deal.

One of my 550's is running a recent svn build of IPCop 2 using a usb 3G modem as red. It is one of the zero config flip/flop modems (which will take micro sd and act as a usb stick) when not in modem mode.