Monday, October 22, 2007

Solaris 10 iSCSI configured with Dynamic Discovery

Recently we went thru re-IPing all of our servers and storage arrays in our office. For the most part everything went fine with the exception of a Solaris 10 U3 server I was running iSCSI on.

After I got thru the steps of changing the server's IP address, gateway and DNS entries I rebooted the server. Upon reboot, I noticed a flurry of non-stop error messages at the server's console:

Sep 30 18:37:37 longhorn iscsi: [ID 286457 kern.notice] NOTICE: iscsi connection(8) unable to connect to target SENDTARGETS_DISCOVERY (errno:128)Sep 30 18:37:37 longhorn iscsi: [ID 114404 kern.notice] NOTICE: iscsi discovery failure - SendTargets (0xx.0xx.0xx.0xx)

As a result of this, I was never able to get a login prompt either at the console or via telnet even though I could succesfuly ping the server's new IP address. What the message above indicates is that the initiator issues a SendTargets and waits for the Target to respond with its Targets. To my surprise there's NO timeout and the initiator will try this process indefinately. In fact, just for kicks, I left it trying for an hour and 45'.

That also means that you will be locked out of the server, as attempting to boot into single user mode results in the exact same behavior.

To get around this problem you have 2 options even though option #2, for some, may not be an option.

Option 1
--------
a) Boot from a Solaris cdrom
b) mount /dev/dsk/c#t#d#s0 /a
c) cd /a/etc/iscsi
d) Remove or rename *.dbc and *.dbp files (iscsi not configured any longer)
e) Reboot the server
f) Use iscsiadm and configure the Solaris server with Static discovery (static-config) so you don't get into this situation again

Option 2
---------
a) Change back to the old Target IP address
b) That will enable you to reboot the server
c) Reconfigure the server to use static-config by specifying the target-name, new Target-ip-address and port-number
d) Change the Target IP address to the new one

I followed Option #1 because #2 was not really not an option for us. So the morale of the story is that you may want to consider static-discovery on Solaris with iSCSI.