Apophis

I've been playing with iSCSI over the past couple weeks and things have been going relatively well. I have a NAS running at home running FreeNAS and the thing seems to be as solid as a rock. I've had no issues exporting CIFS shares and iSCSI drives to my local network and both work VERY well from my local machines.

My issues have been arising when I'm trying to use Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator for Windows XP/2003 from a remote location back to my iSCSI Target server on the FreeNAS box. I've got ports 3260 and 3205 (Just for good measure) open and I can see the individual target drives in the initiator, but I just can't seem to map to them.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Some of my research has led me to believe that there may be TCP header issues going through both the Initiator's and Target's NAT firewalls and the ACL defined for the iSCSI Target may not be matching the header due to all this wonderful NAT'ing.

It's not terribly important I get it working remotely, but I did kind of like the idea of exporting an iSCSI Target that I could get to from work so I could map a local drive on my workstation and mobile laptop back to my NAS at home. I can always resort back to using a CIFS volume through my IPSEC VPN but I thought using iSCSI would just be.. well.. cleaner.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

jmaker

Raise your hand if you don't know what he just said.

/raises hand

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Wimpinator

I looked at a few NAS solutions a year ago when I was turning an old machine into my file server. I finally just used a pared down Debian install with Samba. Of course I just wanted to share my music files between my home machines. The NAS stuff was just over my head being a fairly new Linux user.

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|TG-6th|Wimpinator

Apophis

If you've got a free machine, check out FreeNAS. It's a very robust package for being as lightweight as it is. iSCSI on a local network is very slick as it eliminates a lot of the issues in Windows with using "shared" drives and allows you to natively mount a single drive on multiple machines.

Samba is good for what it does, but give iSCSI a whirl and see what you think!

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Apophis

LOL.. I'd be happy to explain any part of it that you don't understand!

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

ednos

Stop right there. You've found your problem.

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Root

All of it?

VPN = Virtual Private Network, and I assume that iSCSI is a type of regular SCSI? Other than that, I didn't understand a word of it.

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Apophis

VPN is correct. Yes.

iSCSI is a method of delivering the SCSI command set and functionality through a network. You have a machine somewhere else with a bunch of drives in it and on that machine you create an iSCSI Target. The target is essentially a large file created on the disk of any size of your choosing. It could be 10MB or 500GB. Whatever you like. This file represents a logically formatted hard drive. The iSCSI Target controller allows that virtual disk to be attached by a remote iSCSI Initiator. The initiator is the software you run on your desktop PC that talked back to the target.

Essentially, what you end up with is a "SCSI" hard drive that uses your network infrastructure as its connecting cable except the drive and actual SCSI controllers are all virtual and are made up of software applications rather than hardware.

This is a very simplified description, but it should help make it a bit clearer.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Apophis

Here are some screenshots for ya.

Looking at the iSCSI drive you can see it appears as a local hard drive with the common features you'd expect to see of a local hard drive. The ability to compress the drive, run the indexing service, etc.



Compare that to a normal mapped network drive and you can see the subtle difference. This makes a big difference to many applications that simply will not install or run over a mapped network drive. They can't tell the difference between an iSCSI drive and a local drive.



Lastly; You can see in the disk manager that the iSCSI drive actually appears as a local drive. In fact, once you use the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator and connect to a drive, you need to hop into your local drive manager and format the sucker just like you would any other newly installed hard drive.

Attached Images

	iscsi.gif (10.4 KB, 41 views)
	filesrv.gif (9.7 KB, 40 views)
	diskmgr.gif (10.5 KB, 41 views)

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Dick Blonov

Cool! Do you know what would be required to set-up an iSCSI target on FC6 ?

DB

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|TG-6th|Blonov

Apophis

You might be able to just do a "yum install iscsitarget", but that will depend on what repositories you have set up. Alternatively; you can just grab a copy of the source here:

http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/

Once you get that installed, you can find the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator v2.03 here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Apophis

Oh, as a side note. I reconfigured my automated Norton Ghost backups to run to my iSCSI target drive. They ran quick and flawless. I think I might set up a specific target on my FreeNAS box just for backups!

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Dick Blonov

Thanks!

DB

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Gambit7

Isnt there some kind of networked external drive you can use to accomplish the same thing w/o even needing another box? I couldve sworn I saw that somewhere. Granted, I'm sure it wasnt SCSI.

Then again, I'm equally confused by this whole thread... but it's still good times. BTW Apo, you better not still have me on ignore in WoW because of my leetspeak ramblings.

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