Josef “Jeff” Sipek

In my previous post, I documented some steps necessary to get OpenIndiana to boot from iSCSI.

I finally managed to get it to work cleanly. So, here are the remaining details necessary to boot your OI box from iSCSI.

Installation

First, boot from one of the OI installation media. I used a USB flash drive. Then, before starting the installer, drop into a shell and connect to the target.

# iscsiadm add discovery-address 172.16.0.1
# iscsiadm modify discovery -t enable

At this point, you should have all the LUs accessible:

# format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c5t600144F000000000000052A4B4CE0002d0 <SUN-COMSTAR-1.0 cyl 13052 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63>
          /scsi_vhci/disk@g600144f000000000000052a4b4ce0002
Specify disk (enter its number): 

Exit the shell and start the installer.

Now, the tricky part… When you get to the network configuration page, you must select the “None” option. Selecting “Automatically” will cause nwam to try to start on boot and it’ll step onto the already configured network interface. That’s it. Finish installation normally. Once you’re ready to reboot, either configure your network card or use iPXE as I’ve shared before.

e1000g

For the curious, here’s what the iSCSI booted (from the e1000g NIC) system looks like:

# svcs network/physical
STATE          STIME    FMRI
disabled       17:13:10 svc:/network/physical:nwam
online         17:13:15 svc:/network/physical:default
# dladm show-link
LINK        CLASS     MTU    STATE    BRIDGE     OVER
e1000g0     phys      1500   up       --         --
# ipadm show-addr
ADDROBJ           TYPE     STATE        ADDR
e1000g0/?         static   ok           172.16.0.179/24
lo0/v4            static   ok           127.0.0.1/8
lo0/v6            static   ok           ::1/128

nge

Does switching back to the on-board nge NICs work now? No. We still get a lovely panic:

WARNING: Cannot plumb network device 19

panic[cpu0]/thread=fffffffffbc2f400: vfs_mountroot: cannot mount root

Warning - stack not written to the dump buffer
fffffffffbc71ae0 genunix:vfs_mountroot+75 ()
fffffffffbc71b10 genunix:main+136 ()
fffffffffbc71b20 unix:_locore_start+90 ()