Arch Linux

captainron

Member

From: Vancouver, BC

Registered: 2010-11-06

Posts: 14

Unable to use device as an iSCSI target

My intended purpose is to have iSCSI targets for a virtualbox setup at home where block devices are for the systems and existing data on a large RAID partition is exported as well. I'm able to successfully export the block files by using dd and added them as a backing-store into the targets.conf file:

include /etc/tgt/temp/*.conf
default-driver iscsi

<target iqn.2012-09.net.domain:vm.fsrv>
    backing-store /srv/vm/disks/iscsi-disk-fsrv
</target>

<target iqn.2012-09.net.domain:vm.wsrv>
    backing-store /srv/vm/disks/iscsi-disk-wsrv
</target>

<target iqn.2012-09.net.domain:lan.storage>
    backing-store /dev/md0
</target>

but the last one with /dev/md0 only creates the controller and not the disk.

The RAID device is mounted, I don't whether or not that matters, unfortunately I can't try it being unmounted yet because it is in use. I've tried all permutations of backing-store and direct-store with md0 as well as another device (sda) with and without the partition number, all had the same result.

If anyone has been successful exporting a device (specifically a multi disk) I'd be real interested in knowing how. Also, if anyone knows how, or if it's even possible, to use a directory as the backing/direct store I'd like to know that as well, my attempts there have been unsuccessful as well.

I will preempt anyone asking why I'm not using some other technology, eg. NFS, CIFS, ZFS, etc., by saying that this is largely academic. I want to compare the performance that a virtualized file server has that receives it's content being served by both NFS and iSCSI, and the NFS part is easy.

Thanks.