Add iscsi root installation feature to debian installer. Later, once FCoE initiators are available, we might need one for that too. So there could be much common code for it. As an add-on, add multipathed installation too.

There could be two approached to it.
1) Pass arguments to the installer at boot. - Like SLES
2) Add an option in Storage Window - Like Red Hat


Ritesh

Hello,

   I was learning about iSCSI this weekend and trying to setup a Debian
Lenny KVM guest so it would install to an iSCSI target. As I found that
there's no official support for it into debian-installer yet, I did some
research and found this bug so I thought I could comment on it.

   It seems that Ubuntu has an open-iscsi-udeb package and a feature by
which one would provide a boot flag named "iscsi=true" while booting d-i
so it will set things up properly for iSCSI targets to be discovered at
boot time.

   I thought that it would be a very nice addition to d-i and as such
sent this message as a reply to this bug report. Philipp, wouldn't it be
nice to incorporate Ubuntu patches to provide an open-iscsi-udeb ?

Hi,

Bumping an old feature request.

I was wondering if there were any plans to add this?


Did experiment a bit with it myself, and it's not that much work to simply
detect the iSCSI settings set in the BIOS/boot firmware, and connect to the
iSCSI target automatically, like CentOS and Windows do.

See the attached (unpolished) patches as a starting point of a way this can be
done.


In short what is necessary is:

- check for the presence of an iBFT table in memory. This can be done by
loading the iscsi_ibft kernel module and checking /sys.
  Since it only scans a memory region and does not do any more agressive
probing, it's safe to load by default.

- if found, it means iSCSI is configured on the computer and the other iscsi
kernel modules should be loaded. As well as an udeb with the open-scsi
usermode tools that are responsible for setting up the connection. Calling
"iscsistart -b" is enough to automatically connect to the target using the
information found in the iBFT and attach the disks.

- make sure open-iscsi is added to the packages to be installed, and that a
initramfs with iscsi support is created, so that the system will start after
reboot.