Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Updating the Linux iSCSI Service to Restart Automatically

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports iSCSI attached remote boot and block volumes to compute instances. These iSCSI attached volumes are managed by the Linux iSCSI initiator service, iscsid . In scenarios where this service is stopped for any reason, such as the service crashes or a system administrator inadvertently stops the service, it's important that this service is automatically restarted immediately.

The following platform images distributed by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are configured so that the iscsid service restarts automatically:

Instances created from earlier versions of CentOS 7.x, CentOS Stream 8, and Oracle Linux platform images, or any versions of Ubuntu platform images, do not have this configuration. You should update these existing instances and custom images created from these images so that the iscsid service restarts automatically. You should also check this configuration on your imported paravirtualized custom images and any instances launched from these images and update the configuration as needed.

This topic describes how to update the iscsid service on an instance so that it will restart automatically.

Note

Configuring an instance to automatically restart the iscsid service does not require a reboot and will increase the stability of your infrastructure.

Oracle Linux 7

To update the iscsid service on Oracle 7 Linux instances, run the following command:

sudo yum update -y iscsi-initiator-utils

After running this command, the version of the iscsid service should be 6.2.0.874 or later.

To check the version, run the following command:

yum info iscsi-initiator-utils

This update does not require a system reboot and will not make any changes to the instances beyond configuring iscsid to restart automatically.

CentOS 7.x

Important

Do not directly edit the systemd iscsid.service file. You should instead create an override to ensure that the restart option isn't overwritten the next time the iscsid service is updated.

To create an override file on CentOS 7 instances, run the following command:

sudo systemctl edit iscsid.service

Paste and save the following into the file:

[Service]
Restart=always

To reload systemd and restart the iscsid service, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart iscsid

CentOS Stream 8

Important

Do not directly edit the systemd iscsid.service file. You should instead create an override to ensure that the restart option isn't overwritten the next time the iscsid service is updated.

To create an override file on CentOS Stream 8 instances, run the following command:

sudo systemctl edit iscsid.service

Paste and save the following into the file:

[Service]
Restart=always

To reload systemd and restart the iscsid service, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart iscsid

Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04

Important

Do not directly edit the systemd iscsid.service file. You should instead create an override to ensure that the restart option isn't overwritten the next time the iscsid service is updated.

To create an override file on Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 instances, run the following command:

sudo systemctl edit iscsid.service

Paste and save the following into the file:

[Service]
Restart=
Restart=always

To reload systemd and restart the iscsid service, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart iscsid

Testing the iscsid Service Update

Perform these steps to verify that the iscsid service has been updated successfully, and that it restarts automatically.

Caution

Do not perform these steps on a production instance. If the iscsid service fails to restart, the instance might become unresponsive.

  1. To confirm that the iscsid service is running, run the following command:

    ps -ef | grep iscsid

  2. To stop the iscsid service, run the following command:

    sudo pkill -9 iscsid

  3. Wait 60 seconds. Then, run the following command to verify that the iscsid service has restarted:

    ps -ef | grep iscsid