Adam,

Can I please ask you to sit down and write a paper for USENIX on this
whole issue and how you resolved it?  You and Stan have done a great
job here documenting and discussing the problems, troubleshooting
methods and eventual solution(s) to the problem.  

It would be wonderful to have some diagrams to go with all this
discussion, showing the original network setup, iSCSI disk setup,
etc.  Then how to updated and changed thing to find bottlenecks. 

The interesting thing is the complete slowdown when using LVM
snapshots, which points to major possibilities for performance
improvements there.  But those improvements will be hard to do without
being able to run on real hardware, which is expensive for people to
have at home.  

I've been following this discussion from day one and really enjoying
it and I've learned quite a bit about iSCSI, networking and some of
the RAID issues.  I too run Debian stable on my home NFS/VM/mail/mysql
server and I've been getting frustrated by how far back it is, even
with backports.  I got burned in the past by testing, which is why I
stay on stable, but now I'm feeling like I'm getting burned on stable
too.  *grin*  It's a balancing act for sure!

Thanks,
John