How to install SCST 3.4.0 in Ubuntu 18.04

Well crap. The other day I talked about how I re-configured one of my Bauer-Power iSCSI SANs using tgt. It was an easy setup, but once I started using it I noticed that tgt performed like shit. CPU's were spiking like crazy on the SAN itself, and when I was backing stuff up I couldn't access the drive on the backup server. It would get completely unresponsive!

I decided I had to go back to SCST. Luckily installing it is way easier than it used to be. To install version 3.4.0 now just do the following:

• Create an empty working directory

 rm -rf ~/scst-build  
 mkdir ~/scst-build  
 cd ~/scst-build  

• Install dependencies

 sudo apt install git devscripts equivs dkms 
 git clone -b ubuntu-3.4.x https://github.com/ubuntu-pkg/scst.git  
 cd scst  
 sudo mk-build-deps -i -r  

• Build the package

 dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc  

• Pre-install, create two directories (For some reason the deb packages don't do it...)

 sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/scst/pr  
 sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/scst/vdev_mode_pages  

• Install

 sudo dpkg -i ../scst-dkms_*deb  
 sudo dpkg -i ../iscsi-scst_*.deb  
 sudo dpkg -i ../scstadmin_*deb  

Now you just have to configure your LUN using the instructions in my tgt post, and configure your /etc/scst.conf file using my old SCST post. Once those are done restart the scst service.

 sudo service scst restart  

Of course, if you don't want to mess with all of the above stuff, you could just download my pre-packaged scst 3.4.0 deb files for Ubuntu 18.04 and run my install script...

 cd ~  
 wget https://mail.bauer-power.net/drop/scst/scst-3.4.0-Ubuntu.tgz  
 tar -xzvf scst-3.4.0-Ubuntu.tgz  
 cd scst*  
 sudo chmod +x install.sh  
 sudo ./install.sh  

Now just setup your LUN files, create your /etc/scst.conf file and run the following commands:

• modprobe scst 
• modprobe scst_vdisk 
• modprobe iscsi-scst 
• iscsi-scstd 
• scstadmin -set_drv_attr iscsi -attributes enabled=1 
• scstadmin -config /etc/scst.conf
• update-rc.d scst defaults
• /etc/init.d/scst restart

Boom! Now you are off to the races!