How can I install LIO “Linux iSCSI” on Ubuntu?

Question

I am wanted to use LIO iscsi-target software on my Ubuntu server to host a target for my VMware box.

The only issue is I cannot seem to find any kind of guide or steps to go about compiling a new kernel with the modifications needed.

Any idea how I could go about this process?

I did find this, but it is for CentOS so I under the impession it will not work for me, or will it?

Answer 1

I wrote one a while back for OpenSUSE (link), which you may have already run into during your googling. Since that's for an RPM-based distribution all the steps aren't 100% accurate.

What you want to do is entirely possible on Ubuntu. The first step is to get a local Kernel source-archive locally. That's extensively documented here. The key step is

sudo apt-get build-dep --no-install-recommends linux-image-$(uname -r)
apt-get source linux-image$(uname -r)

Which will get it locally. Read the whole thing for more on the details of compiling stuff for kernels.

From there, you need to pick up the LIO archive from the backports channel (see my link).

git clone git://linux-iscsi.org/lio-core-backports.git lio-core-backports.git
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/storage/lio/lio-utils lio-utils.git

Next step: prepare the kernel. Change-directory into the kernel source (most likely /usr/src/linux) and run the following pair of commands:

make oldconfig
make prepare

This will prep the kernel for compiling modules for your current kernel rev.

Next, change into the lio-core-backports.git directory you created above and run:

./autoconfig
make
make install

Errors here are likely to due to the kernel archive not being prepped correctly. The last step here actually installs the modules. Now to install the utilities that make managing this easier.

Change into the lio-utils.git directory and repeat the above commands.

You now have (probably) LIO-Target installed. Time to get your config file worked up. Once you've gotten to the point of figuring out how to get the config files tweaked just right, you already have the kernel modules installed and ready to roll.

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Disclaimer: I am minimally familiar with how Ubuntu's package manager works, so the above apt-get stuff was pulled directly from documentation. Your actual commands may vary. Batteries not included.

Answer 2

It's a little more complicated to make this work on Ubuntu. I have done it on a 3.2 kernel, but I think everything was already OK in the 3.0 kernel.

Grab from either kernel.org or rts git: configshell < make deb & install deps & dpkg -i targetcli < make deb & install deps & dpkg -i rtslib < make deb & install deps & dpkg -i lio-utils < run dpkg-buildpackage in ./debian

after installing lio-utils I had to chmod 755 /usr/lib/python/dist-packages/tcm_*py

after /etc/init.d/target start I had to manually mount configfs once and restart target once more

After that you should be able to run the status command.

root@klappstuhl:~# /etc/init.d/target status
[---------------------------] TCM/ConfigFS Status [----------------------------]

[---------------------------] LIO-Target Status [----------------------------]

Statements that it is not working without the commercial tools seem to be mostly FUD.

The build is not very easy and the documentation has not seen love since Ubuntu 7, but it'd still be nice if Ubuntu could concentrate on properly packaging this software instead of older one like (iet not having proper reservations and tgtd being unable to use initiator group ACLs - NO a ip/netmask setting is NOT an initiator group!)