... getting the TODO list done. For a couple of weeks now, my Windows Small Business Server 2003 has been telling me the weekly backups failed. I think the tape drive in this 10 year old server hardware finally died, leaving me feeling a bit vulnerable to fires, floods, or more likely in my neck of the woods, an extended power outage.
I've also been meaning to do a test deployment of iSCSI target. (In iSCSI parlance, the target is the storage server and the initiator is the storage client. So, last night I finally got around to building and installing the IET on a CentOS 5 server I had installed for just such purpose. You must install GCC, the kernel-devel, and openssl-devel packages and any dependancies in order to build the IET kernel module and install it. (I was previously under the mistaken impression that you had to patch the kernel to use this tool. That is not the case.).
You can get the tar ball from sourceforge, via the IET website. I ignored the advice for RedHat users to get the rpm, because it is fairly old. The most recent version as of this writing was 0.4.16. As I mentioned, after installing the dependencies mentioned in the previous paragraph, the install went just as described int he README that is included in the tarball.
I edited the configuration file to make a single target from a whole RAID device, and restarted the daemon, everything worked more or less fine. (There's a single error in my message log that I haven't figured out yet, but everything seems to be working.)
Then, I had to setup the initiator on my Windows 2003 Server. This is built into Windows 2008 (and Vista), but for Windows 2003 (and XP) you need to download the initiator from Microsoft.
Once I installed the initiator, I told it what IP address to look for the iSCSI target at. Once it found the target, it new about the volume I published and let me connect to it. When connecting I checked the box to reconnect when rebooting. The final step was to click the "Bind All" button shown in the illustration.
Once the iSCSI initiator connected to the target, your network (iSCSI) volume looks just like a local drive to the disk manager. I thought this was really slick for about an hour's worth of hacking about and installing software.
If you are thinking about doing this, you should be aware of what happened to my 100 MB home network when I did this. What happened was: It croaked. The interface on the server got pegged at 100% saturation while formatting the drive I setup to use for backups. Its OK for me becuase of two reasons: 1) I'll only backup during hours when I am asleep and not using the network much anyway. 2) Its a proof of concept. I can always turn it off it it becomes a problem.
If I do this in the real world, I will probably do it on a separate storage network fabric, and it will be over gigabit Ethernet. I even know what sexy new little Cisco switch I would use, but that can be a topic for a future post.
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