May 1, 2026
Disk drama goes long-distance
We Run iSCSI over the Internet
He Put Old-School Drive Sharing on the Public Web and the Comments Went Wild
TLDR: A developer made an old office-style drive-sharing system work across the public internet, even offering free test disks. Commenters were split between impressed curiosity and haunted skepticism, with jokes about broken tools, old storage trauma, and the fact that this somehow works at all.
A developer just did something that made the internet’s storage nerds do a full double take: he took iSCSI—an old system for making a hard drive appear over a network—and pushed it onto the public internet, a place it was never really meant to live. In plain English, he’s letting people mount remote disks from anywhere, even offering a free no-signup test drive. That alone was enough to summon the crowd on Hacker News into the comments like it was opening night.
And the reactions? A glorious mix of amazement, trauma, and “absolutely not.” The builder popped in to say the short version is basically: pick an image, get a block device, and yes, there’s a free scratch disk. That kicked off the classic internet split-screen. On one side: people impressed that this somehow works at all, calling it a fascinating rethink of ancient enterprise plumbing. On the other: battle-scarred veterans immediately flashing back to storage disasters, flaky setups, and the cursed era of weird hardware boxes. One commenter basically said, “I need to rethink my feelings from the md1000 era,” which is tech-comment-section speak for this project just reopened old emotional wounds.
Then came the funniest subplot: remote disks over the internet apparently work just enough to tempt chaos. One commenter admitted they’d spent a weekend running encrypted remote storage this way and were “vaguely surprised it works at all” before confessing it also loves to freeze up. Another used the thread to mourn macOS support, complaining that decent tools are either dead or absurdly expensive. So yes, the story is partly about clever engineering—but the real show is the comment section asking whether this is genius, reckless, or both.
Key Points
- •The article explains how scsipub provides iSCSI targets over the public internet, adapting a protocol originally intended for trusted rack-scale SAN environments.
- •scsipub uses Ranch 2.x listeners for plain TCP on port 3260 and TLS on port 3261, with listener child specs added to the application supervisor at boot.
- •Its architecture maps one TCP connection to one initiator session and runs each session in its own lightweight BEAM process.
- •The article argues that BEAM process overhead is low enough to support many mostly idle iSCSI sessions without thread-pool tuning typical of C implementations.
- •Session logic is implemented as a GenServer with negotiation and full-feature phases, and malformed PDUs or protocol errors terminate only the affected session process.