On Sat, 2008-03-29 at 11:21 -0400, Ralph Crongeyer wrote:
> Hey Tom,
> Thanks for the reply.
> Yup you are right about all of those facts. I installed the iscsi
> initiator using "yum install" so it's the iscsi setup from RedHat. That
> is the problem, even though the order is correct (S07iscsid, S10network,
> S13iscsi, S25netfs) the drives don't mount unless I change netfs to
> (S60netfs), so it starts later in the boot process.
> Also that is only half of my problem because the vmware vm's are on that
> drive and the default vmware rc script setup has S19vmware which is
> before the default S25netfs script so vmware will stare and there will
> be no vm's available. I wanted to see if others were running into this
> problem and how to fix it. I know that the vmware issue isn't a problem
> for everyone but if the default setup for iscsi is to be 25 in the boot
> order vmware may need to change their default start script order to
> something higher than 25 just so when they get the problem fixed it will
> all work out of the box.

Well, I don't have this problem at all with the existing default setup.
I think the proper solution would actually be to troubleshoot why your
system is unable to mount the iSCSI volumes at S25netfs?  The most
likely scenario is that because your network requires a delay before it
is really ready to forward packets, typically caused by spanning tree
taking 30 seconds or more to enter the forwarding state, although there
can be other causes.  If this the issue it can usually be resolve by
adding a delay to the network initialization script.  With RHEL5 this is
easy, just add a line like the following to the /etc/sysconfig/network
file:

NETWORKDELAY=30

This would cause the network startup script (called as S10network) to
startup all of the interfaces and the sleep for 30 seconds before
continuing with the startup of other services.  This is generally very
effective for solving problems in environments where the network is slow
in entering the spanning tree forwarding state and is certainly worth a
try.  You may be able to use a time period less than 30 seconds, or in
extreme cases I've had to use values as long as 60 seconds, but I've
generally found 30 to be a good starting point.

If the problem is not network related then maybe you just need to tweak
the timeo.login_timeout and initial_login_retry_max values in iscsi.conf
to be more "aggressive" in attempting to startup you iscsi connections
but since you know that it works if you just move the script further
down, I would suspect the network delay would be sufficient.

Later,
Tom


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