iscsid does not start automatically having iscsi root

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This appears to be an upstart bug and some type of regression between Jaunty and Natty.

The solution for me was to edit rc-sysinit.conf -

in Natty it's start condition is:
start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=lo

Whereas in Jaunty its:
start on filesystem

When I edited the script back to the way Jaunty was, it started working correctly. It's possible this is also affecting other rcS scripts, since my logs indicated that open-iscsi was never being invoked at all.

It's also worth noting that as is iscsid in new Ubuntus (Natty has it, probably others past Jaunty as well) will fail and disconnect targets when it's invoked on an iscsi root because of a kernel change (it treats "(null)" as real credentials, rather then indicating no credentials and will fail out of discovery sessions and node logins ).

To fix this I had to build open-iscsi against the newer 2.0.872 version. A straight rebuild with the new sources and the Ubuntu debian folder worked fine. It's a 3 line patch to fix the issue, and the new version should probably be rolled out as an upgrade since without using an ISCSI root is badly broken.

recompiling the "current stable" open-iscsi requires a lot of work on Oneiric because it hasn't been updated to recognize the change to kernel v3.0; additionally, once I got it to compile, it gave me oopses in the init sequence.

Furthermore, a simpler and "easier to maintain" solution for me was to simply roll iscsid into the initramfs by extracting the attached tarball over "/" and then running "update-initramfs -ck all"

Okay, forget what I just said in comment 5... installing open-iscsi v2.0-872 userspace *does* seem to be the best option for Oneiric users, *however*, the packaged version on the open-iscsi website doesn't play nice with the 3.0 kernel. Instead, I used the git master, and skipped building the modules.

I have setup a client system running Ubuntu 12.04 using an iscsi root filesystem. There is no problem with the root filesystem; everything boots up just fine. However, I experience the exact same problems as those reported in the initial bug description. I.e., iscsid is not running, so connecting to other iscsi targets doesn't work. Starting iscsid causes the mounted root filesystem to misbehave. The above description suggests that it remounts read-only. I have seen that some of the time, and I have also seen a complete hang.

I tried adding the "initramfs patch to roll in iscsid" from comment #5; this appears to have made no difference.

I'm going to try installing open-iscsi from git as proposed in comment #6. I'll report back on my luck.

Strange that I'm having these problems, though. Everything is currently working just fine with some Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) clients. I'm tempted to let the installer upgrade a copy of the Oneiric image to see if the problem recurs.

Regards,
-Jon

Okay, I have success building the open-iscsi userspace from source.

$ git clone git://github.com/mikechristie/open-iscsi.git
# HEAD is at commit dd73b7d12b6bc5f4f4d08c2ac7dcfc5f00f6fd29
$ cd open-iscsi
$ make
$ make install
$ update-initramfs -c -k all
# manually copy /boot/init* to the appropriate iscsi target via scp to the fileserver itself

Now, after booting, 'ps -ef | grep iscsi' shows two instances of iscsid running. 'iscsiadm -m session -P 1' returns the expected output, and I can mount my /boot just fine.

I have not tried backing out Mark's "initramfs patch to roll in iscsid".

One strange thing is that my client (ahem.. initiator) connected to all of the available targets on the iscsi server, not just the one of interest to me. So far no harm done, so I may not spend the time to track it down.

Thanks Mark, for the tips.

Regards,
-Jon

In attempting to debug this earlier, I had set 'node.startup = automatic' in /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf, so that during discovery /etc/iscsi/nodes/* were all set to automatically start. This is completely unrelated to the main problem identified by this bug; I just wanted to make that explicit, since I mentioned the issue in comment #8.

Thanks,
-Jon

I had the same problem as described above. I am running ubuntu 12.04.2 which is booted via iSCSI (no internal hard drives). iscsid is not running and when I start it and try to attach a drive the root filesystem will change to read-only. The fix was as Jonathan McCune described to recompile open-iscsi. I chose version 2.0.873 which is used in ubuntu 12.10.

apt-get install git make gcc
git://github.com/mikechristie/open-iscsi.git
cd open-iscsi
git checkout 2.0.873
make
make install
update-initramfs -c -k all
reboot