Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 164782
RFE: add support for diskless clients based on iSCSI
Last modified: 2010-04-06 09:08:31 EDT
Currently system-config-netboot only supports diskless clients via NFS. It would be nice to be able to configure booting of iSCSI based diskless clients as well. Especially since system-config-netboot does complain that the boot files in /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinug.cfg/ you've created manually for iSCSCI-boot refer to a profile which 'is not PXE Operating System' and you cannot add that profile to pxeos.xml. FYI. I've been successfull in setting op diskless iSCSI booting using iscsi-init (http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscsi-init/). Create an initrd with: mkinitrd \ --preload=<network-module> --with=iscsi_sfnet --with=iscsi_init \ initrd-iscsi-<network-module>.img <kernel-version> And configure initiator name, target name, etc. either in the dhcp server or in the boot file. I'll try to reuse the initrd creation used for NFS diskless clients so you don't have to create a separate initrd for every network card. Would RedHat consider booting with iscsi-init or would setting up iscsid from the initrd be the preferred approach?
I am currently looking into enhancing system-config-netboot to support iSCSI, as well as other non-PXE boot protocols such as eLiLo and yaboot . I've CC-ed the iSCSI maintainer on this request, to look into integrating any existing iSCSI boot client configuration tools with system-config-netboot. You may have a problem "reus[ing] the existing initrd used for NFS diskless clients", as the "init" script, "disklessrc", currently uses NFS only .
Great to hear you are already looking into this. My intention was to hack disklessrc a bit to enable iSCSI support, not to use it verbatim. What I haven't figured out yet is how to create the initrd: with NFS one can mount the client fs on the netboot server, but with iSCSI this is not so straightforward. Any ideas on this?
Hi Jason, I've been working on iscsi-boot for RHEL3 the past month(s) and now have a working initrd and creation tool. Basically it is an adaption of updateDiskless and disklessrc: I removed NFS and read-only root setup and added iscsi init by iscsid, support for ethernet bonding, RAID1 and iSCSI target configuration through DHCPs Root-Path parameter. Our primary usage is for diskless servers, rather than clients, hence the RAID1 and bonding features. Since the netboot server typically cannot access the iSCSI disk of the client, unlike with NFS, currently the updateDiskless tool has to be run on the client rather than on the netboot server. So I don't see yet how this would integrate into system-config-netboot. Maybe you have some ideas for this?
Is there going to be bonding support added to system-config-netboot any time soon? When can we expect this? Thank you.
I think this is still relevant. Moving to RHEL5 so it can be on the radar.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion, but this component is not scheduled to be updated in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. If you would like this request to be reviewed for the next minor release, ask your support representative to set the next rhel-x.y flag to "?".
This is quite invasive change for RHEL 5 release and as system-config-netboot is now in maintenance mode only and there's no further development, I'm closing this RFE as WONTFIX now.