Article URL: Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI & PXE - Syncopated Pandemonium Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item.id=48045012 Points: 68 # Comments: 25.
The bit I’d be watching like a hawk here is what happens when the storage side hiccups mid-boot or mid-write — iSCSI timeouts can look like “random” filesystem corruption unless you’re really strict about multipath and sane session timeouts.
ISCSI is the kind of failure mode that makes you feel insane — it’ll “recover” and you’re still left with a boot that’s half-dead because your root LUN vanished for 8 seconds. I’ve seen initramfs just park itself after a dumb switch blip; the session reconnects on paper, but the box is already wedged. You kinda have to treat the network like it’s your disk backplane: multipath, redundant links, and timeouts that bail out clean instead of hanging forever.
