alt Hacker NewsI dislike neg comments but really curious - I can see the how but absolutely clueless about the why. Running a block device over a high latency WAN link seems like a terrible idea, what's the use case?
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I don’t have a use case, but I was thinking the same thing. But then I realized that the WAN speeds available now are equal to or faster than the LAN speeds I had when I had reason to use iSCSI. And things worked out decently well then, so I can see this being useful.
https://scsipub.com/blog/an-esp32-as-a-network-attached-usb-...
Apparently, exposing small USB sticks to industrial equipment that uses it for loading/saving configs and screenshots and being able to 'network' it with shared iSCSI drives.
"The scope writes screen_001.png to “USB”; the file appears in a directory on my desktop, in the iSCSI overlay. Combined with a dropbox-style sync I no longer need to walk over and pull the stick out."
Quite brilliant and clever, if you ask me.
I'm wondering now about using an ESP32 stick and an iSCSI image of Windows install media - that could make for some fun in-house computer imaging setups.
I've answered some down the tree a bit for the inspirational use case for it.
Since I built it, I've started seeing it as a hammer for many nail-like problems - I think that would die down over time;
but.. I have my ESP32 "pendrive" that's net-synced. I have used it to install OS through UEFI-built-in initiator. I have added iSCSI targets to my windows laptop machine (and VMs) - while you need to deal with disconnects and reconnects, it actually works well enough.
It is a terrible idea, that doesn't sound as terrible for odd use-cases. But yes, the ESP32 over 2.4GHz over 3G internet is slow as molasses (20-30kB/s) - but when the alternative is 0.. or walking over there with a laptop, it works OK.