Well it’s been a few months and love it!
Here’s a little speedtest.net snippet:
Download: 93.89Mb/s
Upload: 4.83Mb/s
Ping: 12ms
Keep in mind I need the connection mostly for upload. I’ve actualy gone over 5Mbps plenty of times. Can’t wait for their 250 plus offering, or even better yet FTTP.
In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to get Lio-Target (an iSCSI target that is compatible with persistent reservations required by both VMware and MS Clustering) running on CentOS 6.
While this tutorial is targetted for CentOS 6 users, I see no reason why this should work on any other newer distributions.
Please note that while Lio-Target 4.x (and required tcm_loop and iSCSI) is available on newer/non-stable development kernels, Lio 3.X is stable, and currently builds nicely on CentOS 6. I will be doing up a tutorial for Lio 4.X once I myself start using it.
One more note, In the past I have thrown up a few tutorials on how to get Lio-Target running on various Linux distributions. These tutorials have worked for some, and not for others. I myself have had a few difficulties replicating the success I did originally. I myself am a technical guy, I do not understand some developer terms, and am not an expert in understanding some development cycles. This is one of the reasons why I had so many difficulties earlier. Since the earlier tutorials, I have caught up to speed and am familiar with what is required to get Lio-Target running.
Now on to the tutorial:
It is a good idea to start with a fresh install of CentOS 6. Make sure you do not have any of the iSCSI target packages installed that ship with CentOS. In my case I had to remove a package called something like “iSCSI-Target-utils” (This shipped with the CentOS 6 install).
1. Let’s download the software. We need to download both the 3.5 version of Lio-Target, along with Lio-utils which was built for 3.x of Lio-Target. (I chose the RisingTide Systems GIT repo since lio related projects have been missing from kernel.org’s GIT repo due to the issues kernel.org has been having recently).
Issue the following commands:
git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-core-backports.git lio-core-backports.git
git clone git://risingtidesystems.com/lio-utils.git lio-utils.git
cd lio-utils.git/
git checkout --track -b lio-3.5 origin/lio-3.5
cd ..
(You have now downloaded both Lio-Target 3.5 backport, and lio-utils for lio-target 3.x)
2. Build kernel modules for your existing running CentOS kernel. Make sure you change in to the lio-core-backports directory first.
Change in to the lio-core-backports directory then issue the following commands:
make
make install
(You have now built, and installed the kernel modules for Lio-Target)
3. Build lio-utils and install. This is one of the tasks I had difficulties with, for some reason the install scripts were calling out to the incorrect python directory, I found a fix to this myself.
Apply the fix first:
Go into the tcm-py and lio-py directories inside of the lio-utils directory. Open the install.sh in both the tcm-py and lio-py directories and change the “SITE_PACKAGES” string to reflect the following:
SITE_PACKAGES=/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages
Remember to do this in both the install.sh files for lio-py and tcm-py. Now on to building and installing lio-utils.
Issue the following commands from the lio-utils directory:
make
make install
And you are now done!
Lio-Target and Lio-Utils have no succesfully been installed. As you can see, this was way easier than my previous tutorials, and doesn’t include and rebuilding of kernels, etc… One of the plus’s is that you actually build the kernel modules for the existing CentOS kernel.
One last thing. Start lio-target by issuing the command:
/etc/init.d/target start
And do a ‘dmesg’ to confirm that it started ok!
As always, feel free to post any comments or questions. I’ll do my best to help!
Recently I upgraded a bunch of ASG’s to version 8.2. While most of the upgrades went smoothly, I did have an issue with a specific box at one of my clients offices.
We had some reports that incomming e-mails were being rejected. After checking the Mail Manager, these e-mails were being rejected due to numerous RDNS failures. While most of the incomming message sources actually didn’t have a properly configured RDNS, I finally noticed in one case that a specific sender actually did have properly configured Reverse DNS…
Googling this specific issue came up with nothing, however I noticed in the DNS proxy on the ASG box, that since the upgrade numerous errors were going through on a daily basis:
mail named: Last message ‘unexpected RCODE (RE’ repeated 2 times, supressed by syslog-ng on host.name
mail named[5466]: lame server resolving ‘X’
These errors were filling the log. I went ahead and logged into WebAdmin and removed the DNS forwarders, hit apply, flushed DNS cache, then re-inserted the DNS forwarders. This resolved the issue.
Well, I decided to upgrade to Shaw’s new “Business Internet 100 Plus” today. I decided to choose the option to pick up the Cable modem, instead of having scheduled a technition since I wanted to play with it today!
Got it done rather quickly over the phone. The plan also includes a phone line, which actually does have to be scheduled since it uses a different device that has to be installed by a Shaw tech.
Anyways, plugged in the new SMC Cable Modem. Noticed that it was an integrated all-in-one Cable/Router/Wifi. This concerned me as I thought I may have received the wrong unit. Plugged it in, noticed Wifi turn on (which concerned me even more). Shortly however, the WiFi turned off, and the “Bridge Mode” was enabled after it was automaticly provisioned by Shaw. (I confirmed this is what actually was happening later on when I spoke to tech support).
Had a few problems getting online. For some reason my account was limited for only 2 devices to have concurrent internet. This was odd and frusterating considering I have 6 Static IPs and should have over 10 Dynamic IPs. After a phone call to Shaw, they resolved this. I also got them to test the line, and all was good.
One interesting thing is that most of the speed test sites out there, actually don’t provide accurate testing since they can’t actually handle your bandwidth. The Shaw Speed test actually reporting a download speed of 98Mbps, and an upload spead of 4.97Mbps.
So far it ROCKS!
Update – July 21st, 2011
It’s been over a month now, and I’m still very satisfied. We had a few minor problems in the past on our old connection with the limitations of upload speed, both for pushing updates out to clients, along with our VoIP system that runs over our internet connection. With the new service, all issues no longer exist. I can actually utilize the internet connection, get the speeds I expect, at the same time use multiple lines on our VoIP system with absolutely NO issues at all.
The speed is still rock solid, the stability of the connection is also still rock solid. Absolutely no complaints whatsoever…
Well,
I finally got some time to tinker with the Microsoft iSCSI Target Software that as of recently is now free. I was surprised how easy it was to get this up and running.
First time, it literally took 30 seconds for the install, and with absolutely no experience I created, configured, and setup a 80GB target and mounted it to a Windows 7 initiator. Took me approx an additional 15 seconds to learn how to snapshot volumes, etc…
The interface for configuration is very light, clear, and non-confusing. I was almost surprised there wasn’t more, but at the same time in all reality there’s nothing else to put on there.
Next plan: Get this running on a physical box and test VMware ESXi hosts connecting to it in a clustered environment. I’ll keep you guys posted!