Showing My Geek

I have been messing around with Zarafa for a few weeks and it is a really cool email  server without all of the cost.  Zarafa is the MS Exchange replacement for Linux servers, which allows you to share your e-mail, calendar and contacts via Outlook or Webaccess.  However for Outlook support you have to purchase the licenses based on the version and the number of users you plan to have.  They have standard, professional, and enterprise versions and they all have increasing features.  There is also a community version that has Webaccess and 3 licenses for Outlook. It also has an add on called Z-push that adds support for model devices.

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The following devices are supported by Z-Push:

• Windows Mobile based devices
• Apple iPhone
• Nokia E-series
• Palm Treo 650, 680, 700
• Sony Ericsson P990, W950, M600
• Android (via third party tool Touchdown)

Zarafa provides full functionality webaccess completely in the Outlook “Look & Feel”. It includes access to email, calendars, contacts, tasks, shared folders and Public Folders. The AJAX implementation with drag & drop support is used be competitive with desktop email applications.

Support for all Outlook versions
The Zarafa architecture is completely based on the mapi standard to have the most stable Outlook integration. All Outlook version from 2000 to the latest 2007 are fully supported. Via the offline caching mode users can also access their email when they are out of the office. All Outlook communication go over a secure HTTP connection.

Wide range of mobility support
Zarafa supports via the opensource Z-Push project all Activesync compatible devices. For more information, see the Mobility section.

Active Directory / LDAP integration
Zarafa can be coupled in existing Active Directory or LDAP based environments. Zarafa will automatically import all your users into the Zarafa database. New users are real-time synchronized to the Zarafa database. Via an additional schema attributes like quota and aliases can be configured.

POP3 / IMAP support
Via the POP3 / IMAP gateway you can always retrieve your email from the Zarafa database. Users working with POP3 or IMAP clients like Thunderbird can therefore use the same mail store as your Outlook users, ensuring that e-mails are never stored twice and that everything is always in-sync.

Advanced database storage
To make the sharing of all the information possible, everything is stored in an opensource MySQL database. The storage of attachments can be done on the file system to keep your database smaller and faster.

Single Sign On
Via the Single Sign On ntlm authentication your domain logon credentials will be used to login your Outlook client.

Brick level backup
Via Zarafa Brick level backup you can make backups of individual mailboxes. Via the Zarafa-restore tool it easy to restore a single item, folder or even a complete mailbox. The Brick level backup can also be used for Public Folders.

Some of the features that I like the best is the calendar and the Webaccess.  The ical feature allows you to keep track of events and even allow other users to have access to your calendar.  I like this because I can have my events on a calendar and allow others to view it without them being able to change things.  The webaccess it also very impressive and has tons of functions from your address book to the task manager.  It was created to be very similar to the Outlook and the Exchange Online Web Access, it is very close.  Here are some screen shots of the Webaccess interface.

There is also a settings link in the lower right hand corner that allows you to setup your email account.  It has things like your email signature, out of office message, calendar settings, and your address book.  Here are pics of the menus.

You can set quotas for the user accounts keep disk usage as small or as large as you want.  This can be done through the server.cfg file in the /etc/zarafa directory.  This will set global limits for all of the users.  You can also create limits as you add the users to the Zarafa.

Adding users isn’t the easiest thing around if your not setup for ActiveDirectory, but it is pretty easy once you get the syntax down.  This is done through the zarafa-admin script that is located in the /usr/bin directory.  The zarafa-admin command is also used to delete users and modify account information.  Chapter five of the Zartafa manual has more indepth usages for the command.  The following is the syntax for the zarafa-admin command.

zarafa-admin -c <user name> -p <password> -e <email address> -f <full name> -a <administrator privilages>

The hardest part I had was setting up the SMTP server in Linux.  It first started out using Sendmail, the Zarafa manual has some of the things you need to do to setup Sendmail for Zarafa use.  Anyhow I had trouble getting it to work correctly so I moved over to Postfix.  After a little configuration of the main.cf file with some help from google and a guide or two.  I got it all working.  Plus Zarafa uses MySQL as the database engine for the email server, and if you need some help with command line for MySQL there are quit a few guides out there that really help.  I would show my config files but for security reasons I won’t put them in the blog.  So all in all this is a really great program, the community edition takes some work to get everything working.  But it has a really good webaccess interface and has most of the features of Outlook making it easy to learn because most people have used Outlook before.    You can find the software and manuals at www.zarafa.com.    There are a few virtual applances out there that will allow you to use Zarafa without having to build a machine of your own.  I plan to change over to Zarafa in the near future, check it out.    In my future posts I will cover the setup of Sendmail and Postfix.

Popularity: 8%

eBox Technologies has released version 1.4 of its Linux server for small to medium sized enterprises.  eBox Platform found at http://ebox-platform.com, is a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network management for small and medium enterprises networks.  eBox Platform can act as a Network Gateway, a Unified Threat Manager, an Office Server, an Infrastructure Manager, a Unified Communications Server or a combination of them.  All these functionalities are fully integrated and therefore automate most tasks, prevent manual errors and save time for system administrators. This wide range of network services is managed through an easy and intuitive web interface. As eBox Platform has a modular design, you can install in each server only the necessary modules and easily extend the functionality according to your needs.  Besides, eBox Platform is released under a free software license (GPL). The main features are:

• Unified and efficient management of the services:

– Task automation.

– Service integration.

• Easy and intuitive interface.

• Extensible and adaptable to specific needs.

• Hardware independent.

• Open source software.

The services currently offered are:

• Network management:

– Firewall and router

* Traffic filtering

* NAT and port redirection

* Virtual local networks (VLAN 802.1Q)

* Support for multiple gateways, load balancing and self-adaptation in case of loss of

connectivity

* Traffic shaping (with application-level filtering support)

* Traffic monitoring

* Dynamic DNS support

– High-level network objects and services

– Network infrastructure

* DHCP server

* DNS server

* NTP server

– Virtual private networks (VPN)

* Dynamic auto-configuration of network paths

– HTTP proxy

* Cache

* User authentication

* Content filtering (with categorized lists)

* Transparent antivirus

– Mail server

* Spam filtering and antivirus

* Transparent POP3 filter

* White-, black- and grey-listing

– Web server

* Virtual domains

– Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

– Certification Authority

• Groupware:

– Shared directory using LDAP (Windows/Linux/Mac)

* Shared authentication (including Windows PDC)

– Shared storage as NAS (Network-attached storage)

– Shared printers

– Groupware server: calendars, address books, …

– VoIP server

* Voicemail

* Meetings

* Calls through outside vendor

– Instant messaging server (Jabber/XMPP)

* Meetings

– User corner to allow users to modify their data

• Reports and monitoring

– Dashboard to centralize the information

– Disk, memory, load, temperature and host CPU monitoring

– Software RAID status and information regarding the hard drive use

– Network service logs in databases, allowing you to have daily, weekly monthly and annual

reports

– Event-based system monitoring

* Notification via Jabber, mail and RSS

• Host management:

– Configuration and data backup

– Updates

– Control Center to easily administer and monitor multiple eBox hosts from one central point

This Ubuntu based server has a great deal of capabilities, which truly does make it perfect for the small to medium business.  I did find the configuration a little tedious but I was just playing around and didn’t have a real use for the machine.   Anyhow it can be setup to a few predetermined roles: Infrastructure, Gateway, Office, Unified Communications, or Unified Threat Manager.  These simply are bundled packages that will be installed from a default menu.  There is alway the option to install packages as you see fit. The function of each role are as follows.

eBox Infrastructure

• DHCP Svr
• DNS Svr
• HTTP Svr
• NTP Svr

eBox Gateway

• Firewall
• Routing Functions
• QoS
• RADIUS Svr
• HTTP Proxy Services

eBox Office

• LDAP
• File Sharing
• PDC
• Printer Sharing Services
• Groupware Services

eBox Unified Communications

• Email Service (SMTP,POP3,IMAP4)
• WebMail Service
• Instant Messaging
• VOIP Service

eBox Unified Threst Manager

• Mail Filter
• HTTP Proxy Advance Configuration
• VPN
• Certificate Services
• IDS

eBox Core (part of all installations)

• Logging Services
• Monitoring services
• Backup Services
• Software Updates
• Control Center Client

There are a few things that I really like about this distro and the first would be the SNORT IDS.  I have installed and configured SNORT before and think it is a very good IDS.  It is a rules based system like most, but I don’t believe it has all of the functionality of a SNORT installation.  Plus I was not able to find the area where you update the signatures for the IDS.  But all in all having it as part of the server is good for network security.  Here is a picture of some of the rule you can configure.

Another feature is the web interface.  It is easy to use and not a bad design.  I do especially like the monitoring tab that allows you to see all of the network traffic and what services are running on the machine.  It also allows to restart these services from the same interface.  Here is a pic of that interface.

The last part is the VOIP support with Asterisk.  This gives you VOIP support for you internal network and it will pass SIP traffic if you have and external service for VOIP calls.  It also has the ability to set up meeting rooms or conference calls, so everyone can dial in to conduct meetings.  Here are some pics of the interfaces.

The installation was straight forward and I had no trouble getting it up and running.  While there is a GUI it is very limited and is primarily so you can bring up Firefox to use the web interface.  I was going to install eBox and deploy it into my network but I would have to drop my web servers and spend time getting everything up and running again.  So with me not wanting to break something that is already working fine, I decided not to get a full test out of an eBox server.  But overall it is pretty impressive and brings loads of functionality.  So if you are trying to set up a network you may want to check out the abilities of eBox and maybe even save some money in the long run.  I couldn’t use it on my network but it may have everything your looking for, eBox can be downloaded from http://www.ebox-platform.com/.  Here are a few more screen shots of the web interface.

Popularity: 60%

Microsoft on Monday announced its next-generation mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 Series, which will bring together the Zune multimedia experience and Xbox Live gaming to mobile phones worldwide.  The phone OS is a mix of the Zune and the Windows Phone 7 series interfaces.  I don’t live on my phone so a pretty standard multimedia phone works fine for me, but the part of this phone I don’t get it the Xbox Live Marketplace.  This OS lets you see your Live profile along with avatars and game achievements.  You can also download titles and games from Xbox Live, so I am guessing it is geared towards the younger and gaming crowd.

It also has Office, OneNote, and SharePoint work spaces allowing users to do pretty basic reading and editing of documents.  My current phone has the same abilities but I would not do any real editing due to the lack of true functionality on a small screen and keyboard of a phone.  Windows Mobile OS failed to become mainstream so we will have to see if this will take off or bomb.   These phones will have to be stunners to take market share from the iPhone or even the Google Android based phones.  We will have to wait for them to make their appearance.  Will they be worth it?  We will have to wait and see.

Popularity: 16%

I was reading on a friends blog today and it mentioned a gadget that I thought was pretty cool.  This piece of software allows users of Windows 7 to see the network activity in their task bars like Windows versions of the past.  There is also a little utility instead of making an icon in the task bar it makes the keyboard LEDs blink in response to network traffic.

This little utility installs into windows and simply place the icon in the task bar.  You can choose from the XP or Vista look for the task bar icon.  Also the network activity for multiple interfaces will all be shown on the single icon.  So it will not be like XP having an icon for each interface on the computer.  It is straight forward and easy too use.  The alternative application is called Network Lights.

This utility is a standalone executable. Run the program, you’ll see a new system tray icon.  Now you can monitor your network traffic using the ScrollLock and NumLock leds on your keyboard.  Use the system tray icon to customize program settings.  I installed this one on my Vista box and thought it is pretty cool to see the blinking lights as you download things.  I am a bit of a computer geek so others may find it to be annoying.

Anyhow these are two little applications that can be used to show network activity on your Windows 7 machines if you really like to see the little blinking icon or even the blinking lights.  These programs were written by Igor Tolmachev and can be downloaded from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/NetworkIndicator.aspx and http://www.itsamples.com/network-lights.html .  You may also want to checkout some more technology blogging at http://www.brettsite.com/techblog/ . 

Popularity: 41%

I have had a few days to try to make deploying printers easier for my works remote site setup.  We use to go to every machine and install the printers on each of the machines.  I knew that it could be done through Active Directory but I just had not done this before.  So today I set it up and it worked like a charm.  There are a few other guides to do this out there but I wanted to share my take on the mater.  To start out you can deploy the printer on a Per User or Per Machine basis.  We set up computers in certain areas and the users change so having a per machine deployment would work best for our situation.  We also want to install the minimum amount of printers to each area to avoid the users printing to printers all the way across the building.

First thing I had to do is setup the AD structure, which I am not going to show here.  So here is a basic way I setup the AD tree to work with the way I want our printers to work.  Our remote networks are small and temporary so we don’t put a great deal of time into the type of configuration you would do for a fixed site.  Anyhow, I setup an OU for each of the work areas and assigned a group policy to it that is only used for the computer accounts and deploying the printers.

This all assumes that you have print services installed and the printers that you are going to deploy are all installed on the server.  We run the print server on the DC because the remote site is only a few hundred machines and we run a mix of Windows and Linux servers.  Using AD to deploy printers is great, it puts the printer on the machines and you don’t have to install drivers on each individual host.

I used CompGroup_1 and 2 for test OUs for the computer accounts.  Once these were setup I created GPOs for the OUs that only deploy the printers.  The rest of group policy is applied to the User accounts.

With the OUs created you need to make the GPOs for the printers.  Like I said earlier we only want a few printers in each work area and we don’t want everyone to have access.  This will help to relieve some of the PEBKAC!!  Anyhow with the GPOs created you simply edit them to add the Pushprinterconnection.exe to the startup scripts for the per machine deployment.  If you want per user you would do the same thing but do it in the Logon scripts.  I found my Pushprinterconnection.exe in c:\Windows\Servicepackfiles\i386.

In the properties of Startup scripts you need to add the PPC to it.  You click show files that will open a window that you will copy the PPC to.  Close it and select add, you need to repeat this for each OU that you are going to use to deploy printers.  Also when you add the PPC you can enter parameters, enter –log to allow logging of the events.  Here are some screen shots of these menus.

This is just the order I went in you should be able to change things around to work for you better.  I have to wait for all of the printers to be put in before I can add them to the server so I setup the AD part first and then the printer connections.  So now we will deploy the printers using the Printer Manager.  It is pretty straight forward and you simply select the printer you want to work with and right click.  Then select deploy with group policy.  This will being up a new menu where you browse for the GPO attached to the OU that you want to deploy the selected print in.  Now that it is selected you can select the method of deployment, per machine or user.  You will repeat this for every GPO and you can add multiple printers to the same GPO.  Here are some screen shots of the menus.  These screen shots show per user being selected, I used these because of time and not have per machine shots.

Once this is complete the printers show up in the Deployed Printers menu in Printer Management.  Finally after everything was completed I enforced the GPOs on the OUs.  Then I ran a script the executed a gpupdate /force on all of the workstations and rebooted.  After everything came up I logged in the machines and every printer was present and  worked.  I did have some issues when I was complete and renaming, and I also had a typo with one of the IPs.  So make sure you have everything planned out and check your work and you should be golden.  This really makes it easy to deploy printers on remote nodes, mass numbers of nodes, or just because you want to be lazy.  I know this isn’t nothing new but maybe I can I help one person and then I am happy.  However I did have to find some screen shots that weren’t from my server just to allow me to finish this post, I hope no one get confused by the different AD layouts.

Popularity: 33%

I have some friends that I work with that really liked the automated network backup feature of Windows 7.  So I started looking into it and came across a program made by GFI that allows you to backup you data to network drives and you can schedule the times that it does it.  Ok this is nothing special with the Operating System’s built in backup utility will do the same thing.  However this software is Free and the interface is easy to use and you can sync files and folders on the same machine, 2 different machines, and from a computer to an FTP server.  Alright lets look at the backup portion of this program.  The backups are pretty much standard with the archive name and the types of files to backup.  It will backup email, music, pictures, registry keys, or just folders that you pick.  The destination for the backup can be done to the local disks, mapped drives, removable media, or to an FTP site.  One of the nice features is that you can compress and encrypt the backups to keep your data safe in case is falls into the wrong hands.  To finish up the backups can be scheduled for weeks, days, and hours depending on your desire.  The program will also email you the errors, warnings, and summary if you want.  If it is automated it is a good thing to know that your backups are successful.  Here are some screen shots of the backup menus.

The restore feature is a simple two radio button menu that allows you to restore an entire backup or to do individual files.  Simple and you got to have it, or whats the point of backups if you can’t restore them.  Another pretty simple menus is the Task menu.  It lists the backups that are scheduled and tells they were run last.  Here are screen shot of these two menus.

Here is my favorite part of this software, the Sync tab.  This allows you to keep two copies of folders exactly the same.  Such as on your home computer and your flash drive,  or a folder on your computer and a network share.  This is what I use because we are not allowed to even have flash drives in the work area were I work.  So I simply sync the files I am working on at home and the network share is accessible through the internet making the files available anywhere I go.  It works pretty much like the backup portion of the software allowing you to schedule the time to sync folders along with the ability to email you the status of the sync.  Here are some more pic of the sync tabs.

This software is free for home use, so it doesn’t work on the server editions of Windows.  It is a nice piece of software and can make a nice edition to an average persons disaster recovery.  Even though most people don’t backup things correctly or don’t backup at all.  But the program can be found at www.GFI.com.  Where you can find several freeware programs that are cool.  All in all backup programs are nothing new but GFI Backup 2009 is a good program that is easy to use and is a nice alternative to the Windows backup utility.  So check it out maybe you will love it or hate it but it is free.

Popularity: 22%

ToutVirtual’s VirtualIQ Pro is specifically designed for IT administrators responsible for managing virtual platforms.  VirtualIQ Pro can be used to visualize, analyze and optimize your choice of virtualization platform – Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and/or VMware.  The VirtualIQ dashboard provides simple, easy-to-use actionable information about your dynamic virtualization environment.  The dashboard allows you to easily identify which hosts and virtual machines are running at high utilization levels as well as provides visibility into where excess capacity lies.  IT administrators can also generate on demand and scheduled real-time/historical reports.  Here are some of the specs from their web site.

Key Features

• Web-based management console
• P2V Consolidation Planning
• Green IT ROI Analysis
• Role-based Access to Hosts and VMs
• Virtual resources supply view
• Host alarms and virtual machine alarm logs
• Host and virtual machine auto-correlated views
• Intelligent alert throttling
• User controlled policy action automation
• On demand web reports – export to CSV, XLS, PDF

Virtualization Platforms Supported

VMware Virtualization Platforms

• VMware ESX
• VMware ESXi
• VMware Server on Windows
• VMware Server on Linux
• VMware GSX Server on Windows
• VMware GSX Server on Linux

Microsoft Virtualization Platform

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

Novell Virtualization Platform

• Xen running on Novell SUSE Enterprise 10

Oracle Virtualization Platform

• Oracle VM

Citrix Virtualization Platform

• Citrix XenServer

This application has several different versions to include a free version that is fully functional.  However it will only support 5 virtual hosts or physical servers.  I have been looking for something like this because I run some ESXi servers and a XenServer and this program allows me to keep track of all of them in the same web interface.  It is a pretty easy install and I put it on Windows XP.  It was up and running in a few minutes.  Anyhow it puts a shortcut on your desktops that will take you to the admin page for the program.  It has two standard users installed automatically and once you login with the preset password you will need to change and maybe even add a new user just for security.  Then you will have to setup a host for the program to log on to.  It had a wizard the very first time and after that you can added new host on the HostIQ tab.  Here is a screen shot of the page you will see every time you log in.

This page is pretty straight forward and displays the virtual machines it is tracking along with the host servers.  It also has the top 5 active and least active VMs.  One of the parts I like is the problems area that will tell you if there is one.  The IP links that are on this page will take you to the HostIQ page that is the important information about the virtual servers.  It list the up time, CPU and memory usage, server status, and there is an error panel at the bottom.  Here is a shot of this page.

The warnings at the bottom of the page are simply traps that you configure in the policy configuration tab.  Most of these here are from going over 80% CPU usage and 90% memory usage.  You can configure an email option that will email you every time one of these levels is reached.

Another feature of this program is the ability to create reports that have a variety of information in them.  It can be based on virtual machines, server hosts, and everything being monitored.   You can also set reports to cover all of the data collected by minute, hour, day,week, and month.  It will create charts that will be based in the criteria selected and you can also have the text data on the reports as well.  Here is some pics of a report and the report configuration page.

VirtualIQ also allows you to setup users that can login to check on the servers and VMs.  You can set them up to have on of two roles, IQ manager or IQ reports.  Plus there is a configuration tab that allows you to set up the email notifications, the information needed to login to the servers, FTP and SSH passwords, and backup servers.  There is also an update tab that checks with the VirtualIQ update server for any patches or fixes that need to be applied to the version you running.  The last this is the ability to export and import the database, configuration, and the database and configuration together.  Giving you the ability to recover from a system crash and to simply backup your data.  This is a pic of the configuration tab.

I run this program on a monitoring machine to simply keep track of my virtual servers in one easy to use interface.  It allows for up to 5 machine to be monitored for free, and me not wanting to spend a fortune on hardware or software this works really well for monitoring my training and testing servers.  Check it out.

Popularity: 39%

I had read a few articles about the Chinese Linux distro that was set up to look like Windows XP.  So I went out and down loaded it to check it out and see how good it is.  Well of course it is a theme that is built on top of Ubuntu 9.10 Casper, I don’t have a great deal of experience with some of the little differences that Ubuntu has compared to a Red Hat based distro.  Anyhow for the most part I thought is was a really good job.  I’m not sure who created the theme but it is put together well and the distro has quit a few programs installed and ready to use.  I did have a few problems with the initial install because it is in Chinese, not a major set back but I had to search the web to find screen shots of Ubuntu to try and make sure I installed it correctly.  The distro iso I downloaded was a LiveCD that had the option to install.  I like these kind of distros because you can check it out without actually having to put it on your hard drive.  Back to the installation, I managed to get my way through the install and here are a few screen shots of the installation screens.

I did have a few problems with the first time I tried to install it, I got a bad iso file and had to re download it.  No biggy just adjust and move on.  Anyhow, Once I got it installed and logged it.  For the most part it did look like XP.  The menus were close and all of the icons were spot on for the Windows icons.  Here are some more pic, take a look.

However I still had one problem and that is the language.  After a little research into how to change the language in Ubuntu I found my way through the menu to the language application.  Well it most likely would of worked fine but English was not installed on the installation.  So back to the drawing board and I had to find out how to install the English language packs by command line because it is in English.  So I found that if you is the command (aptitude install language-pack-en-base language-pack-gnome-en) it will install the English language packs.  Here is a screen shot of the menus to go through to get to the language app and the terminal window to install english.

I am not sure if this is the best way or if I was just luck but it worked.  I also went into the language application and removed the Chinese language pack from being used and here are a few screen shots after I was finished.

I did have to rename a few things and once I was finished everything was in English.  So not I started to check everything out to see how it was set up.  For the most part it was a basic Linux install with all of the users needs pretty much covered.  It had Firefox for web browsing, Open Office for any word processing, and several other user friendly applications right down to a Tetris like game.  As long as I have been familiar with Ubuntu it has always been really user friendly and adding a Windows theme will really help the average Windows user to experience Linux without having a drastic learning curve that most Windows users experience.  This distro also has Wine installed that will allow for the use of some normal Windows applications but it won’t run video game.  It still has the terminal window and you will still have to have a basic knowledge of Linux to do some of the updates and installations that a user may require.  But for the most part it is put together nicely and I think I will let my children use it so they can learn about Linux while still having a familiar interface for them to use.  So if you are like me and like to check things out to just say that you did it.  Try it, it has a LiveCD so you don’t have to install it but it is in Chinese.  There may be English distros of Ylmf out there I just didn’t find one.  This is a good distro and maybe it will even cause a few Windows users to convert over to Linux once they find out how great the OS it.  Here is a screen shot of the desktop once I was finished.  I hope you don’t mind screen shots, it is the only way I can show you what is what and it breaks up the otherwise endless text.

Popularity: 44%

After the previous article I wanted to get it working on Linux. Let me say it is a little more tricky to get this going. For the Red Hat based distro you can use YUM to install the iscsi utilities. Once it was installed you have to go into the /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf file and edit the entries if you are using CHAP to authenticate the connections to the SAN. You will need to be or have root permissions to edit it. I will post an example of this file at the end. Now you are ready to start the iSCSI service and enter /etc/init.d/iscsi start . Then enter (iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p 192.xxx.xxx.xxx) this will allow you to discover targets on the SAN. Then you restart the iscsid service. With that completed you should be able to see the targets on you machine, however if the targets have not been used before you will need to make the partition and format the drive. Then is should show up in the system drives. If not you can run the command fdisk -l to show all of the disks that are installed on the machine. Then you can have it mount automatically with the following command (chkconfig iscsi on), and add the following syntax to the fstab (/dev/sdd1 /mnt/iscsi ext3 _netdev 0 0). I would think you could do the same thing with Ubuntu or Debian by replacing the yum install with (sudo apt-get install open-iscsi).

Here is part of the iscsid.conf file:

#

# Open-iSCSI default configuration.

# Could be located at /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf or ~/.iscsid.conf

#

# Note: To set any of these values for a specific node/session run

# the iscsiadm –mode node –op command for the value. See the README

# and man page for iscsiadm for details on the –op command.

#

################

# iSNS settings

################

# Address of iSNS server

#isns.address = 192.168.0.1

#isns.port = 3205

#############################

# NIC/HBA and driver settings

#############################

# open-iscsi can create a session and bind it to a NIC/HBA.

# To set this up see the example iface config file.

#*****************

# Startup settings

#*****************

# To request that the iscsi initd scripts startup a session set to “automatic”.

# node.startup = automatic

#

# To manually startup the session set to “manual”. The default is automatic.

node.startup = automatic

# *************

# CHAP Settings

# *************

# To enable CHAP authentication set node.session.auth.authmethod

# to CHAP. The default is None.

#node.session.auth.authmethod = CHAP

# To set a CHAP username and password for initiator

# authentication by the target(s), uncomment the following lines:

#node.session.auth.username = username

#node.session.auth.password = password

# To set a CHAP username and password for target(s)

# authentication by the initiator, uncomment the following lines:

#node.session.auth.username_in = username_in

#node.session.auth.password_in = password_in

# To enable CHAP authentication for a discovery session to the target

# set discovery.sendtargets.auth.authmethod to CHAP. The default is None.

#discovery.sendtargets.auth.authmethod = CHAP

# To set a discovery session CHAP username and password for the initiator

# authentication by the target(s), uncomment the following lines:

#discovery.sendtargets.auth.username = username

#discovery.sendtargets.auth.password = password

# To set a discovery session CHAP username and password for target(s)

# authentication by the initiator, uncomment the following lines:

#discovery.sendtargets.auth.username_in = username_in

#discovery.sendtargets.auth.password_in = password_in

I don’t use CHAP so I didn’t have to configure this file.  I installed the initiator, started the service, and logged on to the SAN.  Everything worked great after that.

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