using iscsi mount for /home directory?

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

I’d like to use an iscsi target for mounting the /home directory.

Has anyone used an iscsi or nas device this way with Interworx? Assuming the CP doesn’t mind linking the /home directory to another partition, I can’t see why this wouldn’t work.

2

Hope you don’t mind me asking (just trying to learn) why would you want to do this?

3

Because I’m cheap! :smiley:

I’m just not sure if the project I’m planning on using this for is going to need this much space, but I also don’t want to get caught with a full / partition- this would be an interim solution created from a spare server I have with a true hardware raid card and ATA 133 drives.

I’ll be connecting to the secondary gigabit port on my new server. I figure gigabit ethernet speed is about the same as an ATA 133 drive, so it should be serviceable storage (if one emphasizes reliability over speed).

4

It works well.

For the record- it seems to work just fine in my testing.

  • Make a mount point on your local interworx installation
  • Configure your iscsi connection to be connect to the iscsi target at startup.
  • edit fstab to mount the target device using the following syntax: UUID=98bc9170-d591-477b-9ada-64eccc7701d /mnt/sdc1 ext3 _netdev 0 0
  • When the iscsi target is mounted successfully in the mountpoint, create a folder e.g., mkdir data
  • make a symlink for home to the data folder on the iscsi target
Lastly, set the immutable bit on the mountpoint (NOT the data folder) using chattr: chattr +i mountpoint. This will prevent any data from being written into the mountpoint directly. Learned this the hard way when I used such a mount for a nightly rsync to a USB drive- when the drive died on me, the rsync filled up the mountpoint folder and locked up the box.