Proxmox iscsi boot installation

rgproxmox1

Member
Feb 4, 2013
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Hi,

I've been trying for a week by now to install Proxmox in an iSCSI boot environment. I took this: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_ISCSI_installation as a starting point, and have even tried many many variations found on different sites that talk about how to install Debian in an iSCSI boot environment. I've tried several of the PVE kernels with no luck. Just for the sake of it, I tried yesterday a regular Debian kernel and the server completed the boot successfully. Has this been tried successfully before? I'm just checking that the link I make reference to before is not just theory, but someone has actually tried it.

The scenario that I experience is that the LAN card initiates the ISCSI sequence, it transfers control to GRUB, which shows the correct kernel to use for the boot and then initramfs comes up, it says it attached successfully to the iSCSI partition and then the "final" boot starts. I see the network connections becoming active (ping from another server), and then it displays "Initiating iscsi targets" (or something similar). It sits there for 3 minutes or so and then it starts complaining that it cannot execute "/sbin/getty" (included in the default /etc/inittab) and complains about read errors on the disk (which, when booting with the regular Debian kernel are not shown) and it just repeats that series of errors over and over again.

Thanks
 
Hi,

I've been trying for a week by now to install Proxmox in an iSCSI boot environment. I took this: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_ISCSI_installation as a starting point, and have even tried many many variations found on different sites that talk about how to install Debian in an iSCSI boot environment. I've tried several of the PVE kernels with no luck. Just for the sake of it, I tried yesterday a regular Debian kernel and the server completed the boot successfully. Has this been tried successfully before? I'm just checking that the link I make reference to before is not just theory, but someone has actually tried it.

The scenario that I experience is that the LAN card initiates the ISCSI sequence, it transfers control to GRUB, which shows the correct kernel to use for the boot and then initramfs comes up, it says it attached successfully to the iSCSI partition and then the "final" boot starts. I see the network connections becoming active (ping from another server), and then it displays "Initiating iscsi targets" (or something similar). It sits there for 3 minutes or so and then it starts complaining that it cannot execute "/sbin/getty" (included in the default /etc/inittab) and complains about read errors on the disk (which, when booting with the regular Debian kernel are not shown) and it just repeats that series of errors over and over again.

Thanks

I just tried once more a fresh install of Debian 6.0.6 and tried to follow the link I put above and I got the same result. The errors that are streaming are:

INIT:cannot execute "/sbin/getty"
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
end_request: recoverable transport error, dev sdb, sector 30103113
...

(Id "4" cycles thru "1", "2", "3", "4", "5" and "6")

(/dev/sdb is where the iSCSI partition was showing up when I installed ran the "debootstrap")
 
I was able to complete the boot by disabling open-iscsi from starting in the /etc/rc*.d directories. I will assume that iscsistart initiates the iscsi processes needed and having open-iscsi starting causes a conflict.

The problem now is at reboot time. I see these messages and I don't see anything happen after:

not deconfiguring network interfaces: iSCSI root is mounted. ... (warning).
Cleaning up ifupdown....
Saving the system clock.
Deactivating swap...done
Will now restart.
 
When I tried "sysrq-w" I saw calls to scsi_execute, scsi_execute_req, "sd_sync_cache", "sd_shutdown", "device_shutdown"... so I'm guessing that the handover between the usual processes and iscsistart is not working properly
 
I was able to work around the reboot issue by modifying /etc/init.d/reboot and replace the line containing:

reboot -d -f -i

with:

reboot -d -f

"-i" tells reboot to shut down all network interfaces just before halt or reboot. I've seen articles where disabling network interfaces is delayed if there's iSCSI connections as a fix in the Kernel, but that seems to be causing problems in my case.
 
I think I found the issue that was preventing it from working. After I was able to boot with the workaround that I described above, I had the need eventually to connect with ISCSI to a storage partition in my NAS. As soon as ISCSID starts running, I get the same symptoms that I originally got while trying to boot: the machine hangs. The shell would behave as if it had a root partition in read only mode. I did another google search and found this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/open-iscsi/+bug/575240

which describes the same original symptoms. I compiled the latest open-iscsi source code, installed iscsiadm, iscsistart and iscsid in their corresponding places, updated initramfs and rebooted and now iscsid can run happily, even at boot time.

So.... the bottom line is that Debian 6.0.7 with open-iscsi version 2.0-871 has the bug that the person in the link described. The version I compiled was 873 and it works. I'm in the process of setting the system as the original Proxmox iSCSI wiki page has to see if it works with this new set of executables, but so far, so good.
 
Hi,

I followed the proxmox install guide on https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_ISCSI_installation but was not able to get it to work. i used Debian wheezy during the bootstrap process and also used the pve-test apt repository. i added following in /etc/apt/sources.list on the boot disk:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main contrib
deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian wheezy pve-no-subscription
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main contrib
deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian wheezy pvetest

i also installed pve-kernel-2.6.32-27-pve kernel instead of pve-kernel-2.6.32-4-pve which is mentioned in the install guide. the pve-kernel-2.6.32-27-pve is required by the proxmox test repository. Besides this i followed all the steps mentioned in the installation guide. We are using ipxe chainloading for the installation. The diskless server gets an ip from the dhcp server and displays the grub menu but after that the boot process gets stuck and a black screen is shown. No error messages are displayed.

Thanks,

Nadir Latif
 

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