Re: iSCSI Boot: Technical Issues

[Mark Bakke <mbakke@cisco.com>]

Paul-

Since DHCP strings are configured directly by the user of a
DHCP server (which knows nothing about iSCSI or LUNs, and
probably shouldn't), we do have to care about the human factors
here.  Otherwise, anyone wanting to support iSCSI boot will
either have to build their own DHCP server tools (or interfaces
to Linux or Microsoft servers), or will have to convince
Microsoft to add iSCSI string and LUN support to DHCP (and
wait for this to happen), or let the user live with a difficult
format.

None of the above solutions are that appealing.  Making the
LUN format easier to handle is by far the simplest solution.

--
Mark

Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "Prasenjit" == Prasenjit Sarkar <psarkar@almaden.ibm.com> writes:
> 
>  Prasenjit> 1. Looks like there is no opposition to making this a
>  Prasenjit> standard draft.  2. After talking to an HCI person in IBM,
>  Prasenjit> I have the following proposal:
> 
>  Prasenjit> We can change the LUN format to be xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx
> 
>  Prasenjit> This notation is subtantially better than
>  Prasenjit> "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" in terms of HCI errors and is almost
>  Prasenjit> equivalent to a 16-bit format representation.
> 
>  Prasenjit> Since most of the numbers are going to be zeros, all we
>  Prasenjit> need to do is to edit 1 set of "xxxx".
> 
> I don't see why human factors questions appear in discussions about
> protocols.
> 
> If you want the UI to be nice, put a nice UI on the application that
> generates the protocol.  I see no reason to make the protocol encoding
> itself user-friendly.
> 
>        paul

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