Comment 9 for bug 394398

I can confirm I have also encountered the same issue and arrived at the same conclusion.

FWIW the node.conn[0].startup varialbe does not seem to get set to automatic when you discover targets with the automatic start-up variable set in your iscsid.conf. So the scenario outlined in Abel's post #8 would only occur if you are manually setting that value.

I did a bit of googling and it seems that Ben Beuchler has already asked the question regarding node.startup Vs. node.conn[0].startup on the open-iscsi group:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/open-iscsi/RnkgDuMyN0A

It appears that it shouldn't be necessary to set both variables.