iSCSI Boot Last Call - Technical Comments

[Mark Bakke <mbakke@cisco.com>]

I have only a few technical comments on the boot draft.  The editorials
have been sent to the authors.  The draft looks good!

Page 4

>    The "LUN" field is a hexadecimal representation of the 8-byte LU
>    number.  Digits above 9 may be either lower or upper case, and all 16
>    nibbles must be present. If the LUN field is blank, then LUN 0 is
>    assumed.

Since most LUNs are just 16 bits (and many of these are even smaller),
I'd like to relax this a bit.  Typing 14 or 15 zeroes plus the actual
LUN value into a field in the DHCP GUI is quite error-prone, since in
a DHCP server's user interface or /etc/dhcpd.conf, this string will be
entered directly by the end user.

So in addition to the rules above, how about:

- If the LUN field contains four or fewer hex digits, these digits
  constitute the LUN number from which to boot.


Page 5

>    It is possible that the port number obtained from the Discovery
>    Service may conflict with the one obtained from the DHCP service. In
>    such a case, the implementor has the option to try both port numbers
>    in the Boot stage.

In this case, I think that we should pick one to take precedence, instead
of leaving it up to the implementor.  Since the discovery service should
have the most up-to-date IP address and port number information, I think
that it should be the one that is used.


-- 
Mark A. Bakke
Cisco Systems
mbakke@cisco.com
763.398.1054