Dedibox and (Open)Solaris

Dedibox¹⁾ is a company from the Illiad²⁾ group, but is also a product name. Dedibox provides hosting for a dedicated server running on a VIA C7 2GHz processor for 29.99€ a month.

Designed by Dedibox in association with VIA Technologies, our dedicated server is based on an exclusive last generation platform with a 2GHz processor and 1024MB DDR2 RAM. Dedibox servers are hosted in an Illiad internal datacenter compliant with the strictest standards for redundancy and security. The server comes with 100Mb/sec bandwidth, without any traffic restrictions and with 100% availability. Your server is connected inside the Free network, allowing you to distribute your content from a network shared by millions of broadband access subscribers. (Excerpt from the Dedibox site).

The Dedibox is normally only available to owners of a french bank account, however, companies such as BestOfData also offer access to that service. Please note that we are not in any way related to that company and cannot vouch for it or its services.

Thanks to the efforts of GUSES group members (the french speaking (Open)Solaris User Group), in close partnership with Dedibox administrators, it's now possible to install a Solaris (or OpenSolaris) operating system on a Dedibox server. Of course, such a procedure is not official, and no support will be provided for it by Dedibox personel. We do not offer any guarantee against data loss or any other consequence of the installation of Solaris or OpenSolaris on a Dedibox.

• Perform a minimal Linux install on your Dedibox (for instance a Debian distribution with a single / partition of 1GB).
• Install the tools required to compile Grub.
• Download and install the OpenSolaris Grub which has support for the UFS filesystem³⁾.
• Create a 254 cylinders Solaris primary partition (fdisk value: bf), you may need to restart the machine to take into account the new partition table.
• Run the following commands (replacing sda2 with your primary partition):

% /usr/local/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda
% ls -l /boot/grub/ufs_stage1_5
[..]
% wget -O - http://kaoru.asyd.net/~asyd/dedibox.ufs.gz | gunzip -c | dd of=/dev/sda2
4096575+0 enregistrements écrits.
2097446400 bytes transferred in 396,671455 seconds (5287616 bytes/sec)

• Ensure that /boot/grub/ufs_stage1.5 exists.
• Ensure that the written bytes count matches the expected one (2097446400).
• Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the following:

title Solaris
root (hd0,1,a)
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -z ID-DEDIBOX,IP_ADDRESS,NETWORK,MASK,GATEWAY
module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive

• Please note that grub numbers partitions starting from 0 ⁴⁾, (hd0,1,a) identifies the first slice of the second partition (sda2).
• Replace in the above menu.lst section upper case keywords with the appropriate values (without any quoting or whitespace) ⁵⁾
• Modify the default grub variable to point to the Solaris item.
• Reboot your dedibox
• Wait a few minutes (about 2 or 3).
• A setup script will perform the following tasks:
  • Create the following files:
    • /etc/nodename
    • /etc/hosts
    • /etc/hostname.vel0
    • /etc/inet/netmasks
    • /etc/defaultrouter
  • Configure the network interface with ifconfig and route.
  • Create SSH host keys.
  • Start SSH.
• The Dedibox should now be reachable with ping, if not there are three possible causes: a mistake in the operation sequence, a mistake in the kernel parameters provided in menu.lst, or an incompatibility with the Dedibox (if the bootpath is no longer correct). Do not hesitate to contact Bruno if you encounter problems.
• You can now connect through ssh to the Dedibox as the root user with password opensolaris (which you should change as soon as possible).

sd-4930# ssh root@shinji
Password:
Last login: Wed Oct 11 21:44:05 2006 from 88.191.25.81
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.10      Generic January 2005
sd-4930# export TERM=vt100
sd-4930# cat /etc/release
                        Solaris 10 6/06 s10x_u2wos_09a X86
           Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                        Use is subject to license terms.
                             Assembled 09 June 2006
sd-4930#

The image currently provided is very small and only includes a base Solaris, with very few tools (more or less a Core cluster plus ssh and a few things). More images will be made available in the future.

• The Dedibox team (especially Arnaud and Antoine)
• Masayuki Murayama for his VIA VT6122 GbE drivers
• GUSES group members (especially Bruno and Gérard)
• Cyrille Moureaux for the translation of this document

* First version October 12, 2006.