Known Issues

After setting up the system for iSCSI Remote Boot with two ports connected to a target and successfully booting the system, if you later try to boot the system with only the secondary boot port connected to the target, Microsoft Initiator will continuously reboot the system.

To work around this limitation follow these steps:

1. Using Registry Editor, expand the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

2. Create a DWORD value called DisableDHCPMediaSense and set the value to 0.

If you are using two Intel® PRO/1000 PT Server Adapters in two PCI Express x8 slots of a rack mounted Xeon system, Windows installation can be done only via a local HDD procedure.

If an iSCSI Remote Boot port CHAP user name and secret do not match the target CHAP user name and secret, Windows Server 2008 may blue screen or reboot during installation or boot. Ensure that all CHAP settings match those set on the target(s).

If you are performing an F6 Windows without a Local Disk installation, do not use Standby Mode.

If you perform a WDS installation and attempt to manually update drivers during the installation, the drivers load but the iSCSI Target LUN does not display in the installation location list. This is a known WDS limitation with no current fix. You must therefore either perform the installation from a DVD or USB media or inject the drivers on the WDS WinPE image.

Teaming is not supported with iSCSI Remote Boot. Creating a team using the primary and secondary iSCSI adapters and selecting that team during the Microsoft initiator installation may fail with constant reboots. Do not select a team for iSCSI Remote Boot, even if it is available for selection during initiator installation.

For load balancing and failover support, you can use MSFT MPIO instead. Check the Microsoft Initiator User Guide on how to setup MPIO.

Intel® iSCSI Remote Boot Crash Dump for Intel® 82598EB 10 Gigabit Network Connections is supported on Windows Server 2003 with Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator v2.06 Boot Version and later.  Crash dump is not currently supported for these connections on Windows Server 2008.

Performing an F6 diskless installation while a removable or temporary storage device (such as a USB flash drive or Firewire drive) is loaded may cause a change in the BIOS boot order. If this occurs, you must re-start the F6 diskless installation. For this reason we recommend not loading a removable or temporary storage device while performing an F6 diskless installation.

This is a known issue for Windows Server 2003 and cannot be rectified by Intel iSCSI Remote Boot. Additional information about this Windows Server 2003 issue can be found in Microsoft support article kb816793.

Linux Known Issues

These error messages do not indicate a block in login or booting and may be safely ignored.

Linux Channel Bonding has basic compatibility issues with iSCSI Remote Boot and should not be used.

In an iBFT system using RHEL 5.2, Anaconda does not automatically start networking upon installation. The user has to manually bring up networking through a console. Please refer to the RedHat documentation for details on how to manually force up the network.

RHEL 5.2 does not support CHAP during installation time. If you use CHAP authentication on the target, please disable CHAP during installation and enable it after the installation is complete.

On RHEL5.1 systems, the wrong network interface is brought up on the first iSCSI Boot after installation. This causes the system to hang and requires a reinstallation at the very least. The workaround for this issue is to edit the init script soon after installation and change the interface you wish to bring up. We strongly encourage our users to use RHEL5.2 to avoid this issue.

LRO (Large Receive Offload) is incompatible with iSCSI target or initiator traffic. A panic may occur when iSCSI traffic is received through the ixgbe driver with LRO enabled. To workaround this, the driver should be built and installed with:

# make CFLAGS_EXTRA=-DIXGBE_NO_LRO install


Last modified on 10/15/08 10:34a Revision 47