Re: iSCSI initiator driver beta version, testers wanted

Hi Brian,

> On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 12:45:07PM +0200, Danny Braniss wrote:
> > Haven't received much feedback, either it's a piece of s... or
> > it's just working fantastic, or ?
> > Anyways, I'm planning to be in Basel for BsdConn next week, so if anybody
> > has something to say about it, i'm a good listener.
> 
> I for one found the idea very interesting. If we could have an iSCSI target
> too, then we would have a complete standards-compliant replacement for GEOM
> ggated/ggatec, which might also form the basis of a low-cost SAN. [*]
> 
> However I didn't reply, for two reasons:
> 
> (1)  I think you said your code had no error-recovery. In my experience, the
> error-recovery code is typically the hardest to write, which implies to me
> the code is a long way from complete and therefore not really worth testing.
> That is, there's no point testing from the point of view "is this code ready
> for production?" when code without error-handling isn't, by definition.
> 
> That's just the impression I got of course, which may be wrong.
> 
I guess I need to clarify some :-), by no error recovery, this is on the
iSCSI side, the scsi part - via CAM - is fully error recovarable.

the iSCSI protocol has error recovery too, and it's this one that's missing,
ie: what happens if the TCP connection falls. 

so if your network is ok, and no one steps on cables, then it's working
fine, no disk corruption, no data loss (FLW - Famous Last Words).

i need to test the initiator with different/more targets, it seems that
the RFC has more than one interpretation :-)

> (2) I didn't fancy setting up a Linux box just so that I had an iSCSI target
> :-)
no need, we did, and we can crash it :-)

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Brian.
> 
> [*] It might be necessary also to have some magic which maps arbitary
> devices under the CAM layer, e.g. so you could share an IDE drive, or a
> gvinum volume, as if it were a SCSI device. Or perhaps the iSCSI target can
> just be a userland daemon, talking to the CAM layer where the device
> supports it, or GEOM otherwise.

correct.

	danny