21.8. Configuring an FCoE Interface to Automatically Mount at Boot

Note

The instructions in this section are available in /usr/share/doc/fcoe-utils-version/README as of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. Please refer to that document for any possible changes throughout minor releases.

You can mount newly discovered disks via udev rules, autofs, and other similar methods. Sometimes, however, a specific service might require the FCoE disk to be mounted at boot-time. In such cases, the FCoE disk should be mounted as soon as the fcoe service runs and before the initiation of any service that requires the FCoE disk.

To configure an FCoE disk to automatically mount at boot, add proper FCoE mounting code to the startup script for the fcoe service. The fcoe startup script is /etc/init.d/fcoe.

The FCoE mounting code is different per system configuration, whether you are using a simple formatted FCoE disk, LVM, or multipathed device node. The following is a sample FCoE mounting code for mounting file systems specified via wild cards in /etc/fstab:

mount_fcoe_disks_from_fstab()
	{
	    local timeout=20
	    local done=1
	    local fcoe_disks=($(egrep 'by-path\/fc-.*_netdev' /etc/fstab | cut -d ' ' -f1))

	    test -z $fcoe_disks && return 0

	    echo -n "Waiting for fcoe disks . "
	    while [ $timeout -gt 0 ]; do
		for disk in ${fcoe_disks[*]}; do
			if ! test -b $disk; then
				done=0
				break
			fi
		done

		test $done -eq 1 && break;
		sleep 1
		echo -n ". "
		done=1
		let timeout--
	    done

	    if test $timeout -eq 0; then
		echo "timeout!"
	    else
		echo "done!"
	    fi

	    # mount any newly discovered disk
	    mount -a 2>/dev/null
	}

The mount_fcoe_disks_from_fstab function should be invoked after the fcoe service script starts the fcoemon daemon. This will mount FCoE disks specified by the following paths in /etc/fstab:

/dev/disk/by-path/fc-0xXX:0xXX /mnt/fcoe-disk1 ext3  defaults,_netdev    0 0
/dev/disk/by-path/fc-0xYY:0xYY /mnt/fcoe-disk2 ext3  defaults,_netdev    0 0

Entries with fc- and _netdev sub-strings enable the mount_fcoe_disks_from_fstab function to identify FCoE disk mount entries. For more information on /etc/fstab entries, refer to man 5 fstab.

Note

The fcoe service does not implement a timeout for FCoE disk discovery. As such, the FCoE mounting code should implement its own timeout period.