Multipath

Now that we prepare for the next Debian Stable release (Stretch), it is time to provide some updates on what the current state of some of the (storage related) packages in Debian is. This is not an update on the complete list of packages related to storage, but it does cover some of them.

REMOVALS

• iscsitarget - The iscsitarget stood as a great SCSI target for the Linux kernel. It seems to have had a good user base not just in Linux but also with VMWare users. But this storage target was always out-of-tree. With LIO having gotten merged as the default in-kernel SCSI Target, development on iscsitarget seems to have stalled. In Debian, for Stretch, there will be no iscsitarget. The package is already removed from Debian Testing and Debian Unstable, and nobody has volunteered to take over it.
• system-storage-manager - This tool intended to be a simple unified storage tool, through which one could work with various storage technologies like LVM, BTRFS, cryptsetup, SCSI etc. But the upstream development hasn’t really been much lately. For Debian Stable, it shouldn’t be part of it, given it has some bugs.
• libstoragemgmt - libstoragemgmt is a universal storage client-side library to talk to remote Storage Arrays. The project is active upstream. For Debian, the package is out-of-date and, now, also needs a maintainer. Unless someone picks up this package, it will not be part of Debian Stretch.

UPDATES

For Debian Jessie, the multipath support relied on sysvinit scripts. So, if you were using systemd, the level of testing would have been minimal.

At DebConf15, I got to meet many people whom I’d worked with, over emails, over the years. With every person, my ask was to use the SAN Storage stack in a test environement, and report bugs early. Not after the next release. This applies also to the usual downstream distribution projects.