Does FOG work with iSCSI?

ManofValor

Can’t find a thread anywhere about this so I’m starting one. Does FOG work with iSCSI and if so how do I go about setting it up? Thanks in advance.

george1421

You need more details here.

Where is the iSCSI target? What are you using it for? Will this iSCSI target be for the deployed client or used by the FOG server.

The short answer is probably because its a block level device, but it depends.

ManofValor

@george1421 Sorry, been busy. The target is a NAS device. Using it to capture and deploy images. Not sure I quite understand the last question but basically I need to store the images till needed for deployment.

george1421

@ManofValor All right then.

What you need to do is connect that iSCSI target to your FOG (linux) server. Mount it onto your linux server onto a mount point. Format the media and ensure that the iscsi target is mounted each time you reboot the linux server. All of this stuff will be done on the linux level since fog doesn’t know or care about its underlying storage. Only if it has enough space.

My memory is bad, but is this the same FOG server where we setup the /images to mount to a separate disk/partition in the fog server (i.e /opt/fog/images)?

VincentJ

If the NAS can be an NFS and FTP server, skip the fog server and use the NAS as the only storage node.

ManofValor

To make sure I understand, I can make the images with the FOG server and then use the NAS to store the images, until ready for deployment. I’ve never used iSCSI so this is all new, even FOG.

george1421

@ManofValor A NAS is roughly equivalent to a second file server to store your images on. You could either connect the NAS to the linux server using NFS. A NAS is a file level device. The FOG server doesn’t need to do anything with the NAS file system since it is just a share from your NAS device. Or you can setup your NAS as a FOG storage node.

The other thing is iSCSI, which is roughly equivalent to using a usb hard drive attached to your FOG server (but connected via your network). The drive that is being connected is a block level device. Your FOG server will need to format the iscsi device and set it up to connect to it each time you boot. Then you will just tell fog to store the images on that device.

For 2 of the 3 options this doesn’t involve FOG at all. If you setup your NAS as a FOG storage node you will need to setup some stuff on your NAS (ftp, NFS, and a NFS share)

ManofValor

@VincentJ Is that what this is for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X72WthDGwsw&fmt=18

Will this not give me what I need?

ManofValor

I also found this:
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Managing_FOG#Adding_a_Storage_Node

Under “Adding a Storage Node” it seems to me that I just follow these steps, am I right?

ManofValor

@george1421 @Wayne-Workman @Tom-Elliott

Am I on the right track with my last two posts?

george1421

A storage node is just another *complete FOG server without the management interface. The storage node runs on a second linux server.

If you are simply wanting to add additional disk storage to your FOG server, you can setup a commercial NAS as a sort of storage node. Or you can connect remote storage from a NAS using NFS for file level storage, or via iSCSI for block level storage. The choice of what route to go is dependent on what device you have available for remote storage.

I’m not finding the post I made earlier today, but in that post I outlined the steps to create and share a remote storage device.

This is a simple definition to a bit more complex setup. A storage node doesn’t contain a sql server or a functional web gui.

Wayne Workman

@george1421 said in Does FOG work with iSCSI?:

A storage node doesn’t contain a sql server or a functional web gui.

in Trunk, apache is installed and does serve some pages like boot.php and others but it pulls from the main fog server’s DB. But there is no functional GUI on storage nodes that people can interact with (unless you call building URLs with GET data in them and reading the results interacting).

Wayne Workman

@ManofValor Maybe everyone here could help more if we knew exactly what device you’re trying to use? iSCSI is pretty vague, it’s a technology, not a brand or model.

ManofValor

@Wayne-Workman It’s a Buffalo Terastation TS-RIXL NAS device. I want this to be my main storage node seeing it is 8T instead of 500G. It is also RAID5.

ManofValor

After doing some reading about iSCSI, NAS, and the like, I asked my boss why it had to be iSCSI and not NFS and said he just likes iSCSI. He said I can do NFS, that it didn’t matter. I hear that is easier than iSCSI?

Wayne Workman

@ManofValor 13 days of stress for what? lol. Fog is built for NFS.

ManofValor

@Wayne-Workman Right.

ManofValor

@george1421 said

@ManofValor A NAS is roughly equivalent to a second file server to store your images on. You could either connect the NAS to the linux server using NFS or you can setup your NAS as a FOG storage node.

For 2 of the 3 options this doesn’t involve FOG at all. If you setup your NAS as a FOG storage node you will need to setup some stuff on your NAS (ftp, NFS, and a NFS share)

So which NFS option would you recommend for a noob?.

george1421

You can set it up as either a file level device (nfs) or a block level device (iscsi). Either method will work. I don’t remember which OS you are using for your fog server. But I think I would go the nfs route because its the easiest.

On your Terastation just create a share and share it out via nfs. If you want to restrict access to this share only allow the fog server to mount this nfs share. The FOG server does need full read/write access to this share. You will need to know the path you shared out of your NAS, because you will have to tell your fog server how to connect to it. You may be able to use the following command from your FOG server to see what the shares are on your nas. showmount -e <IP address of NAS>

The first step would be to create a mount point on your fog server and then connect to NAS either via nfs or iSCSI to the mount point on the fog server. You would do something in the order of

mkdir /mnt/fognas
mount -t nfs <nas_ip_addr>:/<nas_nfs_share> /mnt/fognas

Then create a bind mount between the /mnt/fognas and /images
mount -o bind /mnt/fognas /images

(note: you may need to move the images directory before the bind mount will work.) Once its setup. touch a file in the /images directory and confirm it is created on this nas. When that is done, mv the contents of the old /images directory to /mnt/fognas folder. Then review /images on the fog server to confirm all of the files are where they should be.

The last bit you need to update is the /etc/fstab so this mount and remount work every time.
(before you do this, post the contents of your /etc/fstab file)

<nas_ip_addr>:/<nas_nfs_share> /mnt/fognas nfs rw,hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192
/mnt/fognas /images bind bind 0 0

Understand I have not tested this myself, but what you want to do is possible (in theory). There will be a performance penalty for doing this since the image will need to move from the nas to the fog server and then from the fog server to the target computer. I have no clue on what you can expect (in regards to performance) from this configuration. I’m going to suspect your NAS will be the slowest part of the deployment.

george1421

I just setup a proof of concept following my previous instructions. Even with a bind mount you can not reshare a nfs connected file system. So my previous instructions are a fail, even using the bind mount.

iSCSI may be the only option to support this scenario.

Does FOG work with iSCSI?

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