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From: John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
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Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:19 -0500
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Cc: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com>
Subject: Re: ggated vs iscsi
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On Friday 07 March 2008 11:25:39 am Pete French wrote:
> > Last time I used it the iscsi-target port had some significant bugs,
> > but looking through cvs it looks like those may have been addressed.
> > I can't really speak to performance. Reliability should be all right
> > as long as you don't have frequent network issues.
>
> Thanks for the warning - do you have any refernces for these bugs ? I
> have been using the iscsi-target for a while and never come across
> anything problematic, but I havent really hammered it hard as yet.

These two (related) PR's are one starting point. Both are closed/fixed. :)

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=117015
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/117690

There was an e-mail thread about some (possibly the same) issues as well 
but I can't find it now. In any case it looks like my experience is out 
of date and the latest version of the port has seen some beneficial 
updates.

> Am currently playing around with using gmirror on a pair of iscsi
> drives mounted using iscsi_initiator/iscsi-target and it seems to
> work rather nicely actually. Reconnest if I disconnect a drive,
> performance is O.K., and it appears to behave itself. I would rather
> use ZFS on top, but I am not sure I *quite* trust it yet after some of
> the comments on here and my own expeineces, so gmirror it is for now.

As long as the rebuild time is okay for you then this is a likely a good 
way to go. Between iscsi, zfs, and all the geom tools there are a LOT of 
options for storage in FreeBSD these days. With more people adopting 7 
the remaining kinks will hopefully get worked out of the former two in 
short order.

JN