When CentOS 5.1 was announced, the upstream release notes contained some notes about new features being integrated in 5.1, like iscsi-target functionnality. Of course they were announced in the "Technology Previews" section, meaning that it's not fully supported and not considered production ready. But most of the time, packages 'just work' [TM].

Is this the case for the package scsi-target-utils-0.0-0.20070620snap.el5 ? hmmm .... On my (already too long) TODO list, I planned to test Ocfs2 on top of a shared device , and because of a lack of Fiber Channel HBAs in my lab, the only solution was to play with iScsi target/iscsi initiator on both machines (3 machines : 1 as a iscsi target and the 2 others as initiator/ocfs2 machines). I already tested the standard IET iscsi target daemon in the past and i was expecting to find almost the same behavior .. but it's not.

In fact, there is *NO* configuration files included with tgtadm so you have to type all your tgtadm commands to create the iscsi target LUNs and share them . The tgtadm tool isn't a big deal and it's even good to add new target on the fly ... but because of the lack of config files, you can't save your actual config and hope to restore it at the next boot ... So you'd better have to save your tgtadm commands in a script and call that bash script from within a new initscript ... I now understand why the release notes consider that it's not *production ready* yet ... so let's see what will be included/modified in 5.3 ...