Re: LIO - the broken iSCSI target implementation

[Andy Grover <agrover@redhat.com>]

On 01/17/2013 12:56 PM, Nicholas A. Bellinger wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-01-17 at 02:19 +0100, Andreas Steinmetz wrote:
>> This is not a technical point of view. This is a more or less political
>> and user point of view. And for any replies, I'm not subscribed (haven't
>> been now for years).
>>
>> As a user, I was in need for an iSCSI target. Actually, I needed to
>> export a SAS tape device (Ultrium 5) - which is one of the devices still
>> sufficiently expensive to go the iSCSI target way) - well, not any disks
>> (cheap enough, NFS available) or CD/DVD writers (I'd call these penny
>> targets nowadays).
>>
>> Thus, lio (http://www.linux-iscsi.org/) seemed to be the politically and
>> technically favoured solution. Except: it simply doesn't work, userspace
>> utilities are seemingly not maintained,
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean.  There are targetcli+rtslib packages are
> available for virtually every distribution
> 
> http://www.linux-iscsi.org/wiki/Targetcli#Linux_distributions

[CCing rrs@debian.org]

No... actually upstream targetcli/rtslib are not very well maintained.
Around 5 patches each in the last year.

Meanwhile, I have been actively maintaining branches at
github.com/agrover/targetcli-fb and github.com/agrover/rtslib-fb. We
have a man page and screencasts even. Feel free to file bugs against
them and I'll respond.

But I'm only packaging for Fedora/RHEL, so random people on Debian etc.
get a bad experience. I'd like to see upstream accept my AGPLv3-licensed
patches, or have Debian package the -fb versions, either instead or in
addition to the upstream versions.

(I'd kinda been waiting to bring it up until upstream had no commits in
a year, but since you mentioned it...)

Regards -- Andy