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    iSCSI: Discovery Sessions



    
    Given the discussions on how to define discovery sessions
    for SendTargets, whether to call the thing that is logged in
    to a canonical, default, or well-known targets, as well as the
    discussions about other uses for a well-known target, we have
    what looks like a simper solution.
    
    Julian had suggested that we simply provide a text key at
    login that says
    
       DiscoverySession=yes
    
    to indicate that the session was to be used for SendTargets;
    no TargetName would need to be specified at all for the session.
    
    Since this was analogous to other "special" sessions, such as
    boot and copy manager sessions, we further combined these
    separate booleans into a SessionType.
    
    This means that rather than specifying the target "iscsi" in
    the login request, the initiator would instead specify:
    
       SessionType=Discovery
    
    That's it.  The session has not been established to any particular
    target (it doesn't need one), the session type is as a discovery
    session, and the target can properly restrict the operations on
    the session to SendTargets.
    
    Anyway, this is a very minor change, but is a lot simpler to
    describe than the way we were doing it.
    
    It also leaves the use of the default target "iscsi" for other
    purposes.
    
    Here's the definition of SessionType, from -97:
    
    
         32 SessionType  
             
            Use: LO 
            Who can send: Initiator 
             
            SessionType= <Boot|CopyManager|Discovery|Normal> 
    
            Default is Normal. 
             
            The Initiator indicates the type of session it wants to create.  The 
            target can accept or reject it. 
             
            A Boot Session indicates to the Target that the only purpose of this 
            Session is boot.  The target MAY restrict the type of iSCSI requests 
            it accepts in such a Session to Logout, NOP-out, and SCSI read 
            commands.  Accepting other commands in this type of session is 
            vendor-dependent.  A target MAY reject a boot-session. 
             
            A CopyManager session MAY indicates to the Target that the only 
            purpose of this Session is a Copy Manager Function.  The target MAY 
            restrict the type of SCSI requests it accepts in such a Session.  A 
            target MAY reject a copy manager session. 
             
            A Discovery session indicates to the Target that the only purpose of 
            this Session is discovery.  The only command accepted by a target in 
            this type of session is a text command with a SendTargets key 
    
    
    The above description replaces the CopyManagerSession, BootSession, and
    DiscoverySession keys.
    
    
    -- 
    Mark A. Bakke
    Cisco Systems
    mbakke@cisco.com
    763.398.1054
    


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Last updated: Tue Sep 04 01:04:17 2001
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