How to create an iSCSI Target on Centos 5.3

This article is a quick howto on how I set up a working iscsi target on a centos box. Note that this was just for my own personal testing and should not be used in a production environment without some serious security and performance enhancements.

On with the HOWTO:...

Start out with a Centos 5.3 server. I will not go into how to set this up but I am willing to bet if you are looking at how to set up iscsi then you already know how to set up a Centos server.

From a command line type

yum update
reboot


This will make sure the system is up to date.

Then Download iscsitarget-0.4.17.tar.gz from SourceForge

I put the above file in /usr/src/iscsitarget If that folder does not exist you will need to create it.

mkdir /usr/src/iscsitarget


Then change to that directory

cd /usr/src/iscsitarget


Now you will have to enter the following commands to extract the files and install iscsitarget.

tar xvf iscsitarget-0.4.17.tar.gz
cd iscsitarget-0.4.17
make
make install


Once installed I created a folder to house my test disk files

mkdir /data/iscsidisks


Then create an empty file for your iscsi target file

dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/iscsidisks/LUN0 bs=1M count=512


(The above command will create a 512 MB file. Adjust accordingly.)


Now onto the config file for iscsitarget

Open up the /etc/ietd.conf file

I added the below options but there are many others as well. See the man file for more help.

Target iqn.2009-01.com.example:testdisk
IncomingUser scott 123456789012
OutgoingUser scott 123456789012
Lun 0 Path=/data/iscsidisks/LUN0,Type=fileio
Alias test
InitialR2T Yes
ImmediateData Yes
MaxOutstandingR2T 8



You may need to adjust the allow and deny files. For my testing I opened it up to allow all connection but you can adjust accordingly

Open up the /etc/initiators.allow file. I added
ALL ALL

to the file.

Now you can then restart the iscsi-target service

/etc/init.d/iscsi-target restart


At this point you should now have a working iscsi target that you can connect to from an iscsi initiator. I will post a separate article on how to connect to this target.

For instructions How to connect to the iSCSI target from Windows Vista click here


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