Mad Cow

I hereby declare this "Project Mad Cow." For reasons.

Not a general treatise on Fibre Channel technology. This is more about providing Ceph-backed disk storage (and all its benefits) over Fibre Channel to the Fnord home datacenter. There are a few machines here with Fibre Channel HBAs. There exists one functional Ceph cluster (and equipment for 2 more). And there are also some Fibre Channel switches and cabling to make it all work.

Desired end state:

• One or more Fibre Channel equipped servers able to access storage over their HBAs
• Storage provided by Ceph clusters

Equipment involved in making this happen:

• tanstaafl, an HP (no 'E') 9000 rp3440, 2U PA-RISC server running the Debian (unreleased port for this architecture) -- this will be the FC client machine
• fnord-201802 Ceph cluster (currently 3 HP (also no 'E') DL380e servers running Debian 12 for amd64 with 10Gbits/sec Ethernet connectivity) -- backend storage
• zarathud, a Dell PowerEdge R620 server running Debian 11 with 10Gbits/sec Ethernet connectivity -- the gateway between the Ceph backend storage and the client system

Software involved in making this happen:

• Debian GNU/Linux (yes, I am a fanboy)
• Linux kernel (also a fanboy)
• Ceph (ditto)
• Linux SCSI target subsystem (not yet sure about fanboi status on this part)