Windows Server 2016 iSCSI target creation error
Thoughts? Tweet @penguin2233 or shoot me a DM. Posted: 3:40pm 04/08/2024
When creating an iSCSI target for use with my diskless SBC project, I encountered an error when installing the iSCSI Target role on my installation of Windows Server 2016.
The VDisk creation would succeed, but it failed during target creation with a very unhelpful error message.
"Unable to connect to the computer"
There is no error code when you use Server Manager. If you search the above message you will find little information on it.
Using PowerShell, the appropiate cmdlet to create an iSCSI target is New-IscsiServerTarget. This also gave me a similar error message.
On the Microsoft website you will find KB2953557 which mentions something about single letter named domains and Server 2012.
However the attached hotfix is not for Server 2016. So I had to dig deeper.
After some more research, I found a Chinese blog that had a similar error, with the fix being the above KB.
They had a single letter named domain, and the KB mentions something about computer name verification. However, I don't run Active Directory in my network. So on a whim I decided to give my server a hostname DNS suffix other than <blank> or .local.
To my surprise, this actually worked! It hasn't affected anything else too, just the RDP certificate is for a new hostname. Pretty simple fix really. Maybe I should've already had a suffix in my deployment?
Sadly there is no other information about this online, most likely because they expect your server to be joined to a domain. Or the internet expects you to use StarWind or some target software that runs on BSD/Linux.