Creating a Multi-Boot Mini-Server

Because of an upcoming job interview (yes, I am still looking, unsuccessfully), I wanted to set up a system with openSolaris and perhaps CentOS. As long as I was doing that, I decided to set up a few other server-oriented Linux distributions, and see if I could get the whole thing multi-booting. Of course, I needed a good candidate system on which to do all of this, and my various laptops and netbooks are not particularly well suited for it. I considered buying a new low cost system, but throwing money at a problem when you are unemployed is not the optimal solution. Then I realized that my nettop system, a Dual Atom motherboard in a Mini-ITX case, might be a good candidate. Obviously, I wouldn't choose an Atom (or even Dual Atom) for a server CPU, but my objective is just to get things loaded and learn about the administration and configuration of such a system.

I started by researching multi-boot openSolaris/Linux systems. As I have mentioned previously, openSolaris uses a modified GRUB bootloader, and I've had trouble setting it up to multi-boot before. I found one good, simple piece of advice in the openSolaris documention - it is possible to boot a Linux partition from the openSolaris GRUB, but it is not possible to boot openSolaris from a standard Linux GRUB. Ok, that makes sense and corresponds with my experience, so I will have to make sure to set my system up to use the openSolaris GRUB, and add whatever Linux systems I install.

The second problem is that when I have tried openSolaris before, it didn't seem to like Extended Partitions on the disk at all - it refused to even see what was inside of them. Now, I don't know if that also applies to the GRUB in openSolaris, but just to be safe I decided to set up one Linux distribution in a Primary Parition, and then the others in an Extended Partition. That way I can make some more tests, and see what works and what doesn't.

So, I wiped the disk and reparitioned it, creating two 32 GB Primary Partitions (for openSolaris and CentOS), a 4 GB Primary Partition for Linux Swap, and the rest of the disk in an Extended Partition, within which I created 8 GB Logical Partitions for Debian, openSuSE and Fedora. There's a lot more space in the Extended Partition, of course, so I will add more Linux distributions once I get this much set up and working.

I'll go into more detail over the next couple of days, but the first results are very promising. After just a couple of minor stumbles, I have all five operating systems installed and multi-booting. One thing that I learned the hard way, but which doesn't surprise me in retrospect, is that openSolaris and its version of GRUB don't know about ext4 filesystems, so I have used ext3 for all of the Linux installations. One pleasant surprise was that the openSolaris GRUB still understands the configfile directive, so I didn't have to copy and add the kernel and initrd directives for each of the Linux installations. Whew.

Now, the next task is to settle in, figure out how to configure them, and get them co-existing as well as possible. More on that over the next few days.

jw 24/8/2009