Please excuse me if this is something that I missed in searching but I found a reference on YouTube to an iscsi sharing module for Houston and no matter what I try to search I just can’t seem to find it to install. I currently have an HL15 with the most recent updates all applied but I’m still having to configure iscsi with targetcli and don’t see another option. Can someone point me to a page that has this new file sharing module that has iscsi support?
I think this support comes with the file sharing module but you have to load the correct drivers. The only documentation I could find for how to do that is here;
AI summarized it for me like this;
Installation Commands (Rocky Linux)
Assuming your HL15 is running Rocky Linux (the 45Drives default), you will need to install the Houston file-sharing package and compile the high-performance SCST kernel modules that the UI relies on.
Run these commands in your terminal:
1. Update your system and reboot (It is highly recommended to do this before building new kernel modules)
Bash
sudo dnf update -y
sudo reboot
2. Remove conflicting native iSCSI packages
Bash
sudo dnf remove targetcli
3. Install Kernel Development and DKMS packages
Bash
sudo dnf install kernel-devel dkms
4. Install and build the SCST packages (Note: This step will likely hang for a few minutes while it compiles the kernel modules. Do not interrupt it.)
Bash
sudo dnf install scst-dkms scst-dkms-userspace scstadmin
5. Configure the modules to load at boot
Bash
echo "iscsi-scst" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules-load.d/scst.conf
echo "scst" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules-load.d/scst.conf
echo "scst_vdisk" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules-load.d/scst.conf
6. Load the modules for your current session
Bash
sudo modprobe iscsi-scst
sudo modprobe scst
sudo modprobe scst_vdisk
7. Install the Houston File Sharing module (if you don’t already have it)
Bash
sudo dnf install cockpit-file-sharing
Once this is complete, refresh your Houston UI in your web browser. When you navigate to the File Sharing section, you should now see an active iSCSI tab ready for you to start carving out LUNs.
The instructions may be slightly different if you are running Houston on Ubuntu. I haven’t done this, but maybe that gets you pointed in some useful direction until a more official response from 45HL.
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Thank you this makes sense as to why it’s not showing up. But this also created more questions rather than less 
First, this isn’t a home-brew device that I installed some random OS on it’s a “fully burned in” 45 drives staff installed HL15 … so it’s very, very odd that they would not have already had the proper iscsi stack that is required by their software setup on the device isn’t it?
Second, and even more odd, their actual KB that I found when I was trying to set it up basically just says “hey dummy just use targercli on the command line”
But here’s the kicker … since I already setup two luns using targetcli and what they’re suggesting would be to switch to a totally different target software that isn’t going to show the luns that already exist I need to decide how to proceed.
and it wasn’t like “oh this kb was replaced by a newer one” that I noticed
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You’ll probably get a response here from @Braeden-45Drives or @Hutch-45Drives tomorrow. You can also send a note to info@45homelab.com and they should be able to walk you personally through what you need to do, although in that case it would be helpful for others to report back here.
I’m not sure why they haven’t updated the KB or provided some other clearer guidance. I don’t know how long you’ve had your HL15, but this feature may be available OOB on newly shipped systems. I think the reason it needs to be (or is safest to be) a separate manual process instead of part of the automated updates on older systems is that installing scst-dkms isn’t a simple software install, it is (re)compiling some kernel modules. Although your system has “the most recent updates all applied”, I think the script steps above to change the iSCSI driver under the hood were intentionally not pushed as an update for that reason. If they did do that you would probably be complaining that they broke your existing LUNs.
I’ve always been under the impression that the “fully burned in” marketing is referring to the hardware. I don’t think you can “burn in” software.
I too wish that the HL15 would come in a more “turnkey” configuration with the software. You’re the not the first to inquire why HL15 doesn’t have typical NAS software packages installed out of the box. That said, that’s not quite what they offer right now. I think it’s mostly a mindset shift for them coming from the enterprise world where this doesn’t matter nearly as much. I believe most of their KB’s were written with enterprise customers in mind as well.
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I get what you’re saying but “fully burned in” in this context literally means that they are delivering a ready to use appliance … you know it, I know it, we all know it … and that is how they sell it so they also know it 
That is, in fact, how it was delivered …. and it works fine for 99% of the people on earth exactly as it comes out of the box for serving NFS and SMB and the truth is I don’t need to have any ui at all, I can easily do all of this from the command line on any unix-adjacent operating system installed on this hardware …. but I bought this hardware specifically rather than just slamming any one of a thousand things together because I was also interested in tinkering with their cool hardware + software features like the diagram with the drive to slot mapping showing failures etc …. it looks cool and fun … so I went looking to see if they had a module for iscsi and found nothing but a YouTube video saying “checkout our cool iscsi plugin” and a knowledge base article that said “hey just use targetcli like you normally would to do iscsi” so I was a little confused, after Davids post, that shows they have had this module that is meant to interact with scst for over a year but that the device that I bought a few months ago didn’t have it available to even install from the repositories that were setup on it let alone installed.
It wasn’t difficult to install or setup, but what was a pain was that I had to disconnect my existing initiators shut down the target then migrate the luns to scst for them to be available in the app and only because when this module wasn’t available on my machine I went looking through their actual official documentation.
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Hello everyone,
I wanted to share a quick update regarding iSCSI exports.
Targetcli was our original method for exporting iSCSI LUNs and it continues to work well for many current use cases. However, we have also released a newer SCST iSCSI module, which is designed to use SCST exports instead of Targetcli.
Both methods export the same LUNs and are interchangeable from a functionality standpoint. The primary difference is that SCST offers improved compatibility with VMware and other enterprise software environments, which may make it a better option depending on your deployment.
At the moment, installing the SCST iSCSI module requires running an Ansible playbook. This is necessary because SCST is compiled from source and requires additional components that are not included in the standard file-sharing configuration.
Once the playbook has been run and SCST is active, all further configuration can be completed directly from the File Sharing tab.
You can find the playbook here:
Please let me know if you have any questions or need any assistance with the setup. I am happy to help.
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@Zack-45Drives this looks to be a good candidate for a future video and guide on docs.45homelab.com.
Or even just update the kb article to say install scst and refresh this module instead of saying just use targetcli