Hello all!
How are you?

Last week, I created my first iSCSI (as a learning process) and I have a simple question about it.

The server with the iSCSI target is: RHEL5.1 (target: /dev/sdb1)
The client with the iSCSI initiator is: WinXP-SP2 (drive e

My question is: After WinXP-SP2 found the iSCSI 8GB target that I had created, I formatted it using FAT32. I know all the issue about iSCSI is block level access to a remote device, but my question is if I can mount the device from inside the linux box?

I tried:

#mkdir /data
#mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /data

And it didn't work - complains about unknown / uncreated filesystem.

My question is more conceptual one... Do sysadmins in the real world, need to mount the block device in their linux boxes for something? Maybe backup the files on this block device? Or the backup will be from another client connects to the target?

iSCSI newbie - Please be patient! :-)

Thanks in advance!

DMor.

The simple answer is no, the linux box cannot mount the partition natively (at least not without some clever hackery). You must first set it up so that it acts as an iSCSI client to itself, then mount the partition off of that.

The problem is that the partition (that the linux system sees) is not a partition, it is effectively a disk, with the partition inside that, and the file system inside that.