The Unnecessary Storage Mapper
When you install Ubuntu Server, it comes bundled with several enterprise-grade storage utilities designed to help the operating system seamlessly integrate into massive data centers. One of these is the iscsid service and its associated iscsi-idmapd component. These services are responsible for discovering, connecting to, and mapping identities for iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) targets—essentially allowing a server to treat a remote Storage Area Network (SAN) drive as if it were a local physical hard drive.
If you are running a small, standalone web server, a Raspberry Pi home lab, or a standard virtual machine that only relies on local NVMe or SATA storage, you are not using iSCSI. Yet, these daemons still start at boot, adding a tiny bit of latency to your startup time and lingering in the background taking up memory. You can safely disable them to optimize your system.
How to Disable the iSCSI Daemon
You can prevent these services from loading using standard systemd commands.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal (or connect via SSH).
- First, stop the running iSCSI services immediately:
sudo systemctl stop iscsid.service iscsid.socket- Next, disable them so they do not attempt to start the next time the server reboots:
sudo systemctl disable iscsid.service iscsid.socket- (Optional) If you are absolutely certain you will never connect this machine to a remote iSCSI SAN target, you can uninstall the package entirely to save disk space and remove all associated utilities:
sudo apt-get remove --purge open-iscsiBy removing or disabling these enterprise storage tools, your standalone server becomes slightly leaner and your boot logs will be free of unnecessary iSCSI discovery checks.