Re: iSCSI

[Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 18 February 2010 19:58, Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Feb 2010, Martti Kuparinen wrote:
>>
>> I need to setup iSCSI target and I was wondering how
>> good/stable/complete/fast the iSCSI support is in NetBSD 5.99.x. All
>> comments are welcome, especially if you use it with VMware ESXi 4.0.
>
> In-tree iscsi target is fast and stable, but low on features.

I've got two machines setup as iSCSI targets; the initiator is Windows
2008R2. One of them, serving three raw disks, never fails (still on
$ uname -a
NetBSD support9 5.99.24 NetBSD 5.99.24 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Feb  2
16:51:41 GMT 2010
root@uksup2:/usr/obj/usr-current/i386/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
i386 )

The other, with slightly newer kernel (but the same has been happening
for quite some time), serving 7 wedges, to the same initiator,
regularly dumps core when the initiator reboots:

[loan8] /usr/pkgsrc/lang/sbcl # gdb /usr/sbin/iscsi-target /iscsi-target.core
GNU gdb 6.5
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB.  Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386--netbsdelf"...(no debugging symbols found)

Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2...(no debugging symbols
found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libpthread.so.1...(no debugging symbols
found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libpthread.so.1
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libc.so.12...
(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libc.so.12
Reading symbols from /usr/libexec/ld.elf_so...(no debugging symbols
found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/libexec/ld.elf_so

Core was generated by `iscsi-target'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0xbbb25aeb in _malloc_prefork () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
(gdb) bt
#0  0xbbb25aeb in _malloc_prefork () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#1  0xbbb25dab in free () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#2  0xbbbd9bdd in iscsi_free () from /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2
#3  0xbbbd36e3 in param_text_parse () from /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2
#4  0xbbbc90e5 in find_target_iqn () from /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2
#5  0xbbbca161 in iscsi_target_start () from /usr/lib/libiscsi.so.2
#6  0xbbbb4f1b in pthread_create () from /usr/lib/libpthread.so.1
#7  0xbbb06140 in ___lwp_park50 () from /usr/lib/libc.so.12
#8  0xb9600000 in ?? ()
#9  0xb9800000 in ?? ()
#10 0x11110001 in ?? ()
#11 0x00000001 in ?? ()
#12 0x33330003 in ?? ()
#13 0x00000000 in ?? ()

When I manually run '/etc/rc.d/iscsi_target start', it usually
recovers (sometimes I have to repeat this, as it dumps core once
more).

> I've used it
> as a backend for a Xen farm. However, adding a LUN requires a restart of the
> daemon which causes havoc. I've also found it to not work with a Linux
> initiator (or more specifically XenServer).
>
> That's why I imported net/istgt which is used in FreeNAS and looks, on the
> basis of my initial experiments, to be ideal.

I've started to consider switching to this; is there any documentation
other than the example .conf files available?

>
> --
> Stephen
>
>

Chavdar Ivanov


-- 
----