(Redhat ES 4, Redhat ES 5, CentOS 4, CentOS 5, Fedora Core 6, Fedora Release 7 )

Format Instructions:
Download and execute the iSCSI setup script ( This script creates a single partition on your iSCSI drive, and formats it with the ext3 file system )
wget http://downloads.service.softlayer.com/iscsi/iscsiformat.sh
bash iscsiformat.sh

Once the script has been executed, you will be asked if you want to confirm before formatting the drive. Enter a 'y' at this prompt and press enter.
The volume will begin formatting, showing you the status of the format task.
At the completion of the format, you will be presented with text very similar to the following:

**********************************
* /dev/sdc1 is now ready for use *
**********************************

The "/dev/sdc1" is the current identifier for your brand new iSCSI drive. Save this name as you will need it later to replace "ISCSI_ID" with it.

To have your iSCSI drive automatically mount at boot time, you will need to follow these steps:
Ensure that the iscsi driver starts at boot:
chkconfig iscsi on
Create a mount point for your new drive. This consists of just creating the directory, so you could use something like:
mkdir /iscsi
Due to the way that iSCSI drives are mounted at boot, you will need to use either the file system id, or a label to mount the partition. The easiest solution involves using a label. To set your label, use the following command:

e2label ISCSI_ID /
can be named however you'd like using alphanumeric characters.

Lastly you need to edit your /etc/fstab in order to have your drive mounted. The following is an example of what you need to append to the file:

# <file system>       <mount point>   <type> <options> <dump> < pass>
   LABEL=/iscsi           /iscsi               ext3    _netdev         0            0

As you can see, the label is how we are referencing the drive, while /iscsi is the mount point. The file system is ext3, and the _netdev option ensures that the operating system will only try to mount the drive, once the network subsystem is online.

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