Fedora 8 and iSCSI
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Overview
The requirement is to connect an EMC Celerra NAS device, via iSCSI, to a Fedora 8 (and later, perhaps, 9) Linux system.
Relevant Information
Most information is still in paper form.
iSCSI-initiator-utils is the name of the software package used here, version 6.2.0.865, and the online repository for this package is http://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=iscsi-initiator-utils .
Routing with Multiple NICS - in test environment, one NIC uses 80 (public) subnet and the other a private subnet, no problem. In the live environment, may want two NICS, but one dedicated for iSCSI usage. How to ensure each NIC doesn’t forward/route to the other NIC? Answer. Background on the commands used in the answer - "Guide to IP Layer Network Administration with Linux".
Best Site
This site - RedHat Tips and Tricks - provides the best overview of iSCSI on Fedora systems (actually RedHat but it matches closely with my own Fedora 8 experience).
Also this information (source) is worth knowing!
# install the iscsi utils
yum -y install iscsi-initiator-utils# change initiator name for new install of iscsi package
/etc/iscsi/initiator.name - InitiatorName=iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:# find targets available to the machine
/sbin/iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p# connect and login to target
/sbin/iscsiadm -m node -T :-1 -p -l# persist the connection for startup
/sbin/iscsiadm -m node -T :-1 -p –op update -n node.conn[0].startup -v automatic#MOST IMPORTANTLY
vi /etc/fstab
device mount point FS Options Backup fsck
/dev/sda /data2 ext3 _netdev,noatime 0 0# logout of connection
/sbin/iscsiadm -m node -T :-1 -p -u
Dedicated NICS for iSCSI
Best practice - use a dedicated NIC for iSCSI on a private LAN. But in the current case, the SAN device resides on a public network within the University. Still wishing to use a dedicated NIC for iSCSI traffic, how do we go about it?
After looking at all sort of routing issues, one site suggests simply using iptables to disable port 3260 - which handles iSCSI traffic - on the NIC which you don’t want such traffic one.