[Pkg-iscsi-maintainers] Bug#603990: open-iscsi: reconnecting to targets fails with kernel >2.6.32 due to sysfs changes

[Jim Paris]

Package: open-iscsi
Version: 2.0.871.3-2squeeze1.1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Hi,

I have a diskless system with root on iSCSI.  After upgrading my
kernel from 2.6.32-5-amd64 to 2.6.36-trunk-amd64, the system no longer
boots because the connection is lost when /etc/init.d/open-iscsi is
called.  Running iscsid manually reports that the authentication was
rejected, but I'm not using any authentication.

I did a bisection on the kernel and found that the culprit is:

  commit 0f4f81dce93774a447da3ceb98cce193ef84a3fa
  Author: André Goddard Rosa <andre.goddard at gmail.com>
  Date:   Mon Dec 14 18:00:55 2009 -0800
  
      vsprintf: factorize "(null)" string
  <snip>
      Change "<NULL>" to "(null)", unifying 3 equal strings.

What is happening here is that the initramfs successfully uses
iscsistart to connect to the target.  Later, iscsid tries to reconnect
using the parameters it finds in sysfs files, like:
  /sys/class/iscsi_session/session1/username
  /sys/class/iscsi_session/session1/password
Before this kernel change, those files contained "<NULL>", but now they
contain "(null)", and iscsid doesn't handle the latter correctly.

Turns out this has already been fixed upstream in open-iscsi (I should
have tried that first!):
  http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/mnc/open-iscsi.git;a=commitdiff;h=f0b670c016c85c882bb0583eaef8ea2f7147d4af

so all that's really necessary is to either use that patch or upgrade
the whole package to the recently-released 2.0-872.

-jim



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.2
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (300, 'testing'), (200, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.36-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages open-iscsi depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.11.2-2   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  udev                          164-2      /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

open-iscsi recommends no packages.

open-iscsi suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information