Mount iscsi Network Devices using /etc/fstab

If you're trying to mount network devices automatically at boot on Linux and your system is not booting correctly. This post is for you.

Today I was working with iscsi. I created portals, acls, luns, targets with targetcli. But when I tried to mount it automatically through fstab file on boot, my system wasn't booting. I looked online and I found that I had to change the mount option. I did and it worked. I am going to write what mount option I used in this post.

When my system wasn't booting, my /etc/fstab configuration file looked like this,

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Thu Nov 24 03:07:55 2016
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/centos-root /                       xfs     defaults        0 0
UUID=0d83fc00-ee94-4741-8163-717418187f59 /boot                   xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/mapper/centos-swap swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
UUID=f246ba49-5772-4efc-bec2-28ff76f46f79 /root/mounts/sdb xfs defaults 0 0

Here UUID=f246ba49-5772-4efc-bec2-28ff76f46f79, this is the iscsi drive I was trying to mount. The mount option was "defaults". But to get it to work, I had to change the mount option to "_netdev". What this option does it, it attempts to mount this device after all the network connection is initialized.

So my working configuration looked like this,

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Thu Nov 24 03:07:55 2016
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/centos-root /                       xfs     defaults        0 0
UUID=0d83fc00-ee94-4741-8163-717418187f59 /boot                   xfs     defaults        0 0
/dev/mapper/centos-swap swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
UUID=f246ba49-5772-4efc-bec2-28ff76f46f79 /root/mounts/sdb xfs _netdev  0 0

Tested on: CentOS 7