RHEL 5.2 iSCSI Host Freezes When Starting iscsi At Boot

[Nathan Curry]

After reading into my problem a bit more I found that most people just
used the _netdev option in fstab to get that to work.  The problem I am
seeing is that iscsi hangs in the middle of starting up at boot.  I gets
to "Starting iscsi" and says that it's trying to connect to the 4
targets at which point the whole system freezes up.  I can't even use
the mouse or turn CAPS lock on an off on the keyboard.

-Nate 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Hodrien <johnh at comp.leeds.ac.uk>
Cc: linux-poweredge at dell.com
Subject: Re: RHEL 5.2 iSCSI Host Freezes When Starting iscsi At Boot
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:13:21 +0100 (BST)

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Nathan Curry wrote:

> I have setup a new RHEL 5 host on my MD3000i a few days ago and The
> system won't boot if the "chkconfiig iscsi on" is set.  If I set it to
> off then the system boots up fine and I can start iscsi and see my
> devices properly.  I believe that the iscsi is starting too soon but I
> am not sure how to change it or if that is actually the problem.  I was
> on the phone with the Dell support techs and it worked for 4 reboots but
> when I setup LVM on the virtual disk and partitioned it the problem
> started happening again.  If anyone has any ideas I am all ears.

I don't know whether this is relevent (or more the point, correct), but I was
finding that LVM on iSCSI wasn't picked up, as LVM had already scanned for PVs
before iscsi started.  I just made it scan again by adding:

vgchange -a y

in /etc/init.d/iscsi after it'd done the automatic login.

jh