We currently do iSCSI boot for a number of clients, and we have developed a kind of cargo-cult set of rules for how it has to be done. I would like to validate some of these assumptions with you knowledgeable folks.
We use iscsistart within the initrd ramdisk to login to the target and create a session to the root file system. At this point, we are under the impression that we must soon thereafter start the user space daemon (iscsid) in order handle some of the iSCSI protocol messages. Is this still true? Looking at the recent source for iscsistart, we see that it now sets the "noop_out_interval" and "noop_out_timeout" to 0 (as recommended in the README file). It does not increase the "replacement_timeout" value to a large time as recommended in the same section. Should we still be doing this after we enter user space? Speaking of user space. Since our root file system is fresh at each boot (read-only root w/ unionfs), the DB files that would normally be created during discovery do not exist. We have found that if we just blindly start the daemon (iscsid) without doing a discovery first, the session will die after a period of time. So what we do, is run a discovery against the current session to populate the DB, fix up the "timeout" values, and then start the daemon. Is this the right thing to do? Anybody know why things lock-up if we don't do this? I notice a recent change in git that prevents discovery for existing sessions. Would this change prevent us from reaching a stable root file system login? One more observation. We are using a SANRAD target, and it uses "65535" for the Target Portal Group Tag". The open-iscsi source uses "-1" (the 16bit signed conversion) to stand for "PORTAL_GROUP_TAG_UNKNOWN", and causes us no end of trouble. It requires us to patch iscsistart, and screws up command line parameters and the like. It appears that there is a problem here with sign conversion. Any comments from people who are doing similar things would be appreciated. Craig --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open-iscsi" group. To post to this group, send email to open-iscsi@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-iscsi -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
