FreeBSD iSCSI Initiator Notes

Having been studying the FreeBSD iSCSI initiator code and following are my notes about it.

1) The iSCSI initiator (version iscsi-17.5) for FreeBSD consists of a user level tool called iscontrol and a character based device driver called iscsi_initiator

2) The character device driver creates a char device /dev/iscsi. Once the driver is loaded various ioctl calls are done to this device entry for the various iSCSI operations.

3) The iscontrol user level tool creates the TCP/IP connection to the target in the function tcpConnect.

4) Connecting me to the target device creates two entries in the /dev directory namely /dev/da0 which is the remote SCSI drive and /dev/iscsi0 which is create while establishing a session.I think the TCP/IP socket is associated with the /dev/iscsi0 file for that particular session.

5) The iSCSI protocol maintains the connection state as per a FSM

Indian Education

I came across this interesting article in NY times regarding the state of education in India. I couldn't have agreed more with it.

This article took me back to my undergrad days at SPCE and made me ponder about what did I learn there. Did it add value to what I am today. Honestly I think out of those 4 years of education only 10% of it must have contributed to my engineering skills and I think that too because I myself had taken interest in some of the subjects being thought like C Programming, OOP, OS, compiler etc. We never had a choice to choose out subjects. It was always pedantic and we forced to do some really useless and non practical assignments at time. I really hated some of the stupid assignments that I had done. And I felt it all the more when I starting doing my MS at Clemson in the US. However this is not the case with all of the undergrad schools in India. Some of the undergrad schools like the IITs, IISC, BITS Pilani are world class as far as undergraduate education goes. Basically the problem with most of the Indian Universities (90%) is that they are very text book oriented and not at all practical. Students who are able to by heart are considered to be more studious than the ones who are more good practically. However I think all of this is somehow connected to the culture we in our country. Since childhood we are taught never to question authority, always go by the books and listen to what elders and teachers say. All this really hinders practical thinking and hence I think most of us Indians (not all of them) are more emotional than practical.

On the other hand, I really loved doing MS at Clemson. Fortunately I was a RA as well. It was fun learning the subjects especially OS, Computer Architecture and Parallel Computing. Everything had a practical aspect to it. There was always independent,creative and free thinking involved. Sometimes I think I couldn't have been luckier. I think American Universities like Americans practice freedom in true sense.

Hopefully similar things will happen in India as well. It's been just 60 years that we got our freedom and we ain't doing that bad....