Monday, June 10, 2013

One more thing I don't like about Debian Wheezy

I'm running a Wheezy iSCSI target, that already caused some headaches. Today I wanted to add two VMDKs to the Wheezy VM to be able to provide more storage to my test cluster. In the past that was easy. Just add your disks, login to the Linux box and issue

echo "scsi add-single-device a b c d" > /proc/scsi/scsi

(Usage: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/archived/SCSI-Programming-HOWTO/SCSI-Programming-HOWTO-4.html)

However with Wheezy there is no /proc/scsi/scsi. The reason being that is has been disabled in the kernel config.

root@debian:/proc# grep SCSI_PROC /boot/config-3.2.0-4-amd64 
# CONFIG_SCSI_PROC_FS is not set

Wtf?! (pardon my French!)

The solution, however, is quite simple, and annoying in itself as well. All you need to do is install the scsitools package. Thankfully, the list of dependencies on a (relatively, I installed VMware tools, thus is has the Kernel headers, gcc, make, perl and iscsitarget incl. modules) fresh Debian installation is quite short...

fontconfig-config{a}
libdrm-intel1{a}
libdrm-nouveau1a{a}
libdrm-radeon1{a}
libdrm2{a}
libffi5{a}
libfontconfig1{a}
libfontenc1{a}
libgl1-mesa-dri{a}
libgl1-mesa-glx{a}
libglapi-mesa{a}
libice6{a}
libpciaccess0{a}
libsgutils2-2{a}
libsm6{a}
libutempter0{a}
libx11-xcb1{a}
libxaw7{a}
libxcb-glx0{a}
libxcb-shape0{a}
libxcomposite1{a}
libxdamage1{a}
libxfixes3{a}
libxft2{a}
libxi6{a}
libxinerama1{a}
libxmu6{a}
libxpm4{a}
libxrandr2{a}
libxrender1{a}
libxt6{a}
libxtst6{a}
libxv1{a}
libxxf86dga1{a}
libxxf86vm1{a}
scsitools
sg3-utils{a}
tcl8.4{a}
tk8.4{a}
ttf-dejavu-core{a}
x11-common{a}
x11-utils{a}
xbitmaps{a}
xterm{a}
 
That's all it takes for you to run "rescan-scsi-bus", which will discover your disks. That was easy, wasn't it?

3 comments:

  1. *sigh*

    Nope.

    # apt-get --no-install-recommends install scsitools

    Learn to skip recommended packages. They are sometimes cruft.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Agreed and very valid, point taken. Bugs the hell out of me though because I assume it doesn't only break my usual work flow but countless others. I don't know the ultimate implications of turning SCSI_PROC_FS back on or the motivation to turn it off. I'm running a server grade OS that I have been enjoying for more than a decade and now I discover a thing a day that has been changed for the worse IMHO.

      Delete
  2. no need to install anything
    echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan

    ReplyDelete