[Pkg-iscsi-maintainers] Bug#866213: open-iscsi: iBFT network setup does not populate PROTO (e.g. PROTO=dhcp, or static) in /run/net-*.conf

[Christian Seiler]

Control: tags -1 + confirmed
Control: severity -1 important
Control: found -1 open-iscsi/2.0.874-2

Thanks for your detailed bug report!

Am 2017-06-28 13:35, schrieb Trent Lloyd:
> When booting with iBFT, the network configuration is performed by
> open-iscsi as part of initramfs.local-top instead of by klibc-ipconfig
> as it would be during for example a PXE boot.  This includes populating
> /run/net-*.conf which is consumed among other things, by cloud-init.
> 
> Currently no attempt to determine PROTO is made, and PROTO=none is hard
> coded into the file which cloud-init does not recognise and crashes 
> out.

Ouch, that's really bad. I've tested iBFT booting, but just in a simple
manually set up libvirt/KVM VM - never with any cloud images. To be
honest, I didn't even know /run/net-*.conf was actually used by any
package after the initramfs, I just thought it was a convenience file
for the administrator to use with their own scripts.

> The approach I took is simply to take the output from iscsistart (which
> as best I can tell will be either 'dhcp' or 'static' and then pipe it
> through 'tr' to lowercase it to match the output created by
> klibc-ipconfig.

iscsistart -f will always print either "DHCP" or "STATIC" here at the
moment:
http://sources.debian.net/src/open-iscsi/2.0.874-3/utils/fwparam_ibft/fw_entry.c/?hl=233#L211-L215

I like your 'tr' solution, but currently open-iscsi only Recommends:
busybox, which is where 'tr' in the initramfs comes from, it doesn't
Depends: on it. I'll have to test whether busybox is required or not,
but I don't believe so. I'd therefore rather not enforce that type of
dependency, but rather do an additional case statement inside to map
this.

I'm raising the severity of this bug to 'important', as it's really
bad if cloud-init breaks because of this.

> This requires a new-ish (last couple years) version of open-iscsi but
> that is already in debian unstable [would only matter if someone
> attempted to backport this functionality, probably irrelevant for this
> bug]

Well, I do plan on asking the release team to update Stretch,
because I do want to support cloud images - which won't be a problem,
as Stretch and unstable are practically identical at the moment. But
first I'll upload a fix for this issue to unstable later today.

Regards,
Christian