How we run iSCSI over the internet

I wish there was built in iSCSI initiator support on macOS. All of the halfway decent third-party ones either broke many OS versions ago (GlobalSAN) or cost a small fortune ($250 for Atto Xtend)

Hi HN - Tom here, I built scsipub.

The short version: it's iSCSI targets on the public internet. Pick an image, get a block device. The free tier doesn't need a signup at all - iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p scsipub.com and --login to iqn.2025-01.pub.scsipub:blank lands you a 64 MB scratch disk. There's a small catalog of OS images you can mount the same way.

The paid tier is where it gets less hobby-shaped: sessions survive disconnects, a single target can expose multiple LUNs, and SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations work end-to-end (REGISTER / RESERVE / RELEASE round-trip clean against sg_persist). That last bit is the cluster-storage primitive — Pacemaker, ESXi HA, and Windows MSCS all use PR for fencing — so you can actually back a 2-node failover cluster off a target on the public internet.

The post linked in the submission is the architectural decision log: Ranch 2.x listeners, a BEAM process per session, COW overlays with per-sector bitmaps, Caddy-managed Let's Encrypt for the iSCSI-TLS port without restarting the listener, and the four open-iscsi quirks that each cost me few hours. There's a section on what we're deliberately not solving (multi-region, RDMA, etc.) so you know the scope.

Two companion projects ship as embedded sub-sites on the front page — one turns an ESP32-S3 into a wireless iSCSI-to-USB bridge, one lets a Raspberry Pi 3/4/5 netboot directly from a target. Both linked from the landing page under "Hardware initiators".

Happy to answer any questions about the protocol, the deployment, or the BEAM-side design choices.

I should reevaluate my feeling about iscsi I developed around the md1000 era.

This is the kind of post that makes me wish HN had bookmarks. The open-iscsi IQN slash issue alone was worth the read. Great work.