Main Inclusion Report for partman-iscsi

Requirements

1. Availability: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/partman-iscsi; available for all supported architectures (in binary NEW at time of writing)

2. Rationale:

   • Implements partitioning changes designed in foundations-karmic-iscsi-installer-support.

   • Expected to be used in server/netboot installations (i.e. on the server CD, and Priority: standard).

3. Security:

   • New package, so no CVE/Secunia history.
   • Runs as root as part of the installer.
   • Talks to iSCSI portals using iscsiadm.
   • No direct processing of binary data.

   • Source code review performed by virtue of the fact that I (ColinWatson) wrote this package

4. Quality assurance:

   • Adds a "Configure iSCSI" item to the partitioning menu when installed; if that item is selected then it asks several critical-priority debconf questions. However, this package does not add any questions to the default installation path.
   • Not (yet?) in Debian.
   • No independent upstream existence.
   • In production this package would normally cooperate with a genuine hardware iSCSI server, although it's possible to emulate that using the iscsitarget package (and that's what I used to write this).
   • No test suite.

5. UI standards:

   • User-visible strings are internationalised using po-debconf, following standard practice in the installer.

6. Standards compliance:

   • Meets usual standards for installer package layout, although these are not directly beholden to the FHS or Debian Policy.
   • Native debhelper 7 packaging.

7. Dependencies:

   • Only non-trivial dependency is open-iscsi-udeb, already in main.

8. Maintenance:

   • Some ongoing development is expected to polish up the UI; for example, we still need to add support for authenticated targets. Since this is a Karmic feature goal, effort will be available for this. Once feature development settles down it should need only about as much maintenance as the rest of partman.

   • The submitter of this report (ColinWatson) is responsible for fixing bugs, and the ubuntu-installer team (which includes me) is the package bug contact.

Reviewers

MIR bug: https://launchpad.net/bugs/BUGNUMBER

ColinWatson