# ISCSI Mounting Help



## Biker803 (Dec 3, 2008)

Hey guys,

Bare with me as I'm pretty new to the BSD/Linux world and I've been on and off experimenting over the past few years.

My goal here is to use FreeBSD 7.0 as an ISCSI Initiator and connect to an existing 14TB SAN (the data partition is NTFS or from what I saw in Ubuntu when I was testing on that... GPT?)

I've already gotten the iscontrol utility to do a discover and return the targetname/address so I know there's no issues communicating with the SAN.

I've created an /etc/iscsi.conf file and initiated the login process with iscontrol already.

The first issue I'm noticing is that when I run 'iscontrol -c /etc/iscsi.conf -n lin9iscsi' I get:


iscontrol[813]: running
[root@LINVIDEO9 /dev]# iscontrol[813]: (pass3:iscsi0:0:0:0):  tagged openings no                                 w 0
iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:0:1
iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:0:2
iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:0:3
iscontrol: supervise starting main loop


1.) It doesn't return me back to the "prompt". I have to hit the enter key and then I get [root@LINVIDEO9 /dev]# again. Is that normal?


This is my /var/log/messages:

Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 kernel: da2 at iscsi0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 kernel: da2: <WINSYS SX3488R 364A> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:0:1
Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:0:2
Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 iscontrol[813]: cam_open_btl: no passthrough device found at 1:
Dec  3 13:22:47 LINVIDEO9 kernel: GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da2p2 is ntfs/SAN.

2.) In /dev I see an iscsi, iscsi0 partition and a /da2, /da2p1, /da2p2, and /da2p3 partition (all of these I assume in some way, shape, or form -- related to the iscsi initiator. I'm pretty sure the partition I need is /da2p2 as that is what is considered the "NTFS" partition according to the log above. I've tried: 'mount -t ntfs /dev/da2p2 /san' and I get kicked out of the remote SSH session, I can't access the website on the server on apache anymore, and it just seems like the entire server goes down. I have to remotely pull the power and power the server back up again in order to access the server remotely again.

I tried using ntfs-3g as well, and while the server does not crash, it never successfully mounts and I have no useful information to help me figure out how to make this work.

To be clear, I HAVE done this on Ubuntu previously (but have had to do a force mount because it would not otherwise mount) -- however I am not looking to continue using Ubuntu, and there are other issues that have arose that made me more encouraged to use FreeBSD instead.

So, does anyone think they could lend a hand? I'm in a bind for time here, and it's vital that I get this set up ASAP.

Thanks a lot guys!


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## richardpl (Dec 3, 2008)

Mounting NTFS can be problematic, so without information what happens after mount (panic or trashing) it is hard to help.

14TB is way to much and I think that it is not supported with ntfs-3g or freebsd native one (but I may be wrong).

Also note that GPT is experimental on FreeBSD. The only real work is done on CURRENT, and MFC to 7 STABLE now and then - I'm not sure how fast.


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## Biker803 (Dec 3, 2008)

Thanks for replying!

I figured that because FreeBSD 7 now has the ISCSI support "built in" it was plenty stable to handle whatever I'd throw at it -- or who knows, maybe it is still. I just don't have much experience with BSD which is probably why I'm where I'm at right now.

Where should I be looking after it (seemingly) crashes when I get it booted up again to see if I can spot anything that would be of use to you?


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## Biker803 (Dec 3, 2008)

Also, we're kind of stuck with NTFS at the moment because we were doing this on a windows box initially but ran into too many problems actually.

I may get a chance in the coming days to reformat the SAN (will have to re-upload 5TB of files, though) -- if that was what I ended up doing, what filesystem should I be looking at using that would play nice with FreeBSD?


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## richardpl (Dec 4, 2008)

ZFS probably would be the best choice. Just pick amd64 and have bunch of RAM.


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