When I rebooted my fedora 16 linux machine today, it hung at first giving error messages like:

systemd[1]: Unit iscsid.service entered failed state.

which is kind of annoying. My workstation takes a while to boot as is, so getting an error message and hang up during boot is worrisome. Especially since I don’t know what iscsi is.

Turns out, ISCSI is basically a way of allowing computers to access each other’s hard drives over a network.  I don’t do this, so I have no configuration files telling the ISCSI daemon (iscsid) what to do.  So it starts up with an error message.  As best I can tell, this service was installed along the way when I set up XFCE and was set to try to start automatically.   After googling the error message, I got a link to a forum thread that suggested just turning off this particular service, which can be done through the GUI or by issuing these two commands as root:

systemctl disable iscsi.service
systemctl disable iscsid.service