After getting open-iscsi going on Ubuntu Intrepid, the next horse was multipath. I did this before on debian etch, but this time it turned into quite an adventure.

First, multipath is simply broken in Intrepid and this doesn’t seem to be taken to be very important. udev’s arguments for /lib/udev/scsi_id changed somewhere around udev 114. Debian patched udev in udev=125-4, see bug 493075.

So I opened an ubuntu bug against udev, LP 306723. Ubuntu doesn’t want to go down this path (1, 2). So off to look at multipath-tools.

Package: multipath-tools
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers

Last night I tried sending a message to the list, but it was moderated: “Post by non-member to a members-only list”. Today I jumped on #ubuntu-devel, but nobody took responsibility for the package or for that matter responded. So I joined the list, but once again was moderated because: “Post by non-developer to moderated list.” Well, maybe eventually my messages will get passed to the list, but I didn’t want to wait for someone else to say “not my problem”.

So I patched multipath-tools myself, and uploaded it as a PPA. It works for me. Getting a PPA setup was an ordeal of it’s own.

So until someone at Canonical cares about multipath being broken, use my package. It looks fixed in the multipath head, but it’s been sixteen months since the last release of multipath so I’m not crossing my fingers waiting for an upstream sync to fix the problem.