CentOS - Oct 2009 - Possible to run iscsi-target and initiator on same server?

I am trying to install Oracle RAC in a two node cluster for testing
purposes, so performance is not something that concerns me. I just want
to go through the process all the way to creating a database. I have all
the prerequisites except the shared storage and thought I'd give this a
try.

I'm running:
- CentOS 5.3 kernel 2.6.18-164.el5
- iscsitarget-1.4.18-1
- iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.868-0.18.el5_3.1

I can discover and login to the node using iscsiadm on the server that
is not also running iet, and see the new scsi disk.

When I try to login using iscsiadm on the server that is running the
ietd daemon, I see packets going over the lo interface in both
directions, but I get error 8 - connection timed out. Wireshark is
reporting TCP Previous segment lost errors with large sequence numbers
like 2999833 and 8999718.

Has anybody tried this, and can anybody offer any help?

Thanks.
Linus

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:37 PM, C Linus Hicks <linush at verizon.net>
wrote:
> I am trying to install Oracle RAC in a two node cluster for testing
> purposes, so performance is not something that concerns me. I just want
> to go through the process all the way to creating a database. I have all
> the prerequisites except the shared storage and thought I'd give this a
> try.
>
> I'm running:
> - CentOS 5.3 kernel 2.6.18-164.el5
> - iscsitarget-1.4.18-1
> - iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.868-0.18.el5_3.1
>
> I can discover and login to the node using iscsiadm on the server that
> is not also running iet, and see the new scsi disk.
>
> When I try to login using iscsiadm on the server that is running the
> ietd daemon, I see packets going over the lo interface in both
> directions, but I get error 8 - connection timed out. Wireshark is
> reporting TCP Previous segment lost errors with large sequence numbers
> like 2999833 and 8999718.
>
> Has anybody tried this, and can anybody offer any help?
You can only do that if you use blockio for your targets, otherwise
fileio will cause a deadlock on the page cache between the target's
usage of it and the initiator's usage of it.

-Ross