iSCSI booting with isboot

[O'Connor, Daniel]

Hi,
I am trying to setup iSCSI booting (mainly for testing an installer) but I am running into issues getting isboot to work.

I'm using isc-dhcpd to get the BIOS to load undionly.kpxe (from the ipxe package) and then using iPXE's sanboot command.

The loader runs and I can load the kernel and isboot.ko (from the isboot-kmod package) OK (although slower than I was hoping - not as bad as loading over tftp though..) but isboot fails to connect.

I see isboot print out the correct information (IP address, target IP and name) but after that it says..

BootNIC: em0
Configure: IPv6 by NIC0
CHAP Type: No CHAP
Attempting to login to iSCSI target and scan all LUNs.
soreceive BHS is not complete
do login failed

The last two lines repeat many times (interspersed with other probe/boot messages) until I get to mount root.

The system sees the hard disk and CDROM but not the iSCSI device.

It is a VM (ESXi defaults for 64 bit FreeBSD) if that matters.

I did have to set kern.cam.ctl.iscsi.ping_timeout=0 on the iSCSI target machine because iPXE's initiator doesn't know how to respond to NOPs so it wouldn't connect.

Thanks.

--
Daniel O'Connor
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum