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Originally Posted by rfrusher
Not sure if I can even dual boot the server with so little harddrive space.
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No, nor am I. But then, as you don't say how much hard disk space this is, you wouldn't expect me to, would you?
Quote:
Originally Posted by rfrusher
I have this old raid 5 server that has windows2003 server on it. My desire is to become profiecient with linux servers. The server is an old dual pentium 3 with 4gb of ram on it. Too old to change hardware. My question is this. Should I leave windows 2003 server on it and run virtual box to create a SUSE server or should I dual boot the box. Not sure if I can even dual boot the server with so little harddrive space.
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I'm an openSUSE fan, but for the desktop. I don't think openSUSE is the best choice for a server (period before a release goes out of support too short). You could do it, but why not choose something more appropriate? (Let's say Debian, Centos or Scientific, for a start.)
I can't quite see the purpose of a server that you don't have available all of the time. OK, you can play with stuff, but you haven't got it available all of the time, so you you can't really rely on that file server/print server/DNS server/web server/whatever that you have chosen to play with, so you really can't build it in to your infrastructure in the same way.
Well, you can do some playing to learn, but you'll have more motivation and genuinely learn more from doing stuff that you actually want and has some real purpose for you, rather than just doing stuff that is an exercise.
So, I don't see that dual boot has much use for a server, and virt only has a purpose if the virtualised server is there all of the time (don't have enough disk space for dual boot?...well, you won't be much better off with virt).
PS, back in the day, I did manage to install two copies of windows (95 & NT), and a copy of Red Hat on a 1.2G drive, but it was a bit of a pain, and I'm not sure what useful purpose that served, either. And gradual 'bloat'/expansion of capabilities means that such a thing would be more difficult nowadays, but it might be surprising what you can do, if you really put your mind to it. But, as I say, you do have to know what the purpose is, or you'll just end up installing 'everything, just in case' or 'nothing, and then not being able to do anything, without lots of installing (to non-existant disk space) first and it sounds as if that won't work.
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Too old to change hardware.
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Yeah, we all have our problems
More seriously, it would probably be a new mobo, a new processor and some ram. That really need not be expensive.
The disk space that you have is probably on some variety of SCSI disks, but if there is a separate interface board, that might not be a problem, either (but that wouldn't make the disk space any bigger). But given that 'last generation' disks are always pretty cheap, the unwillingness to upgrade anything suggests that maybe this isn't a project to which you give a high degree of priority. I don't want to lecture you on what you should and shouldn't consider, but ensure that you have thought this through.
