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Last weekend, I got an old, but very high-end, SCSI slide scanner.

  • My "real" computer is a laptop running Windows 10. AFAIK, there's no cheap/good way to directly give it a "real" SCSI port.

  • I have an old desktop computer running Windows 7, and several old PCI SCSI cards that might conceivably work with it.

  • I have software (Hamrick VueScan) that's capable of working with the scanner... IF I can come up with some reasonable way for the laptop to communicate with the scanner.

I've never used it directly, but I know that lurking somewhere in Windows, there's a protocol called "iSCSI" that (as I understand it) tunnels SCSI over TCP/IP.

If I get a SCSI card, scanner, and VueScan to work on the old desktop computer, can I then use iSCSI to share that computer's port/scanner over the network, so I can then create a virtual SCSI port (with attached scanner) on the laptop & use the old desktop computer headless like a big, glorified port adapter hosting the SCSI port and scanner?

If so... how do you configure it at both ends?

Bitbang3r
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1 Answers1

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I don't expect you'd be able to make it work. iSCSI isn't a complete encapsulation of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP. It was specifically created as a way to transmit SCSI block storage commands in Ethernet frames to use commonly-available network infrastructure to connect shared SCSI storage. It requires both the initiator and target to understand and support iSCSI specifically.

Your scanner is using SCSI as a data access protocol to talk to the SCSI controller in your PC, but it is not a block storage device. There would be no way to define it as an iSCSI initiator or target.

Source: 15 years of managing iSCSI storage networks.

ThisOneGoesToEleven
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