EVMS Online Replace not working

[thepustule]

Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same experience as me. I have a server running with EVMS for storage management. (The server boots of a standard Linux software raid for the root volume, but the large storage volume uses EVMS on different physical disks. This allows me to keep things simple - no need for an initrd to get EVMS working)

My problem is this - I can't seem to get online replace working, for the life of me. If I umount my evms volumes, I can relocate them at will - it's actually quite crazy and almost scary how easy it is to move evms volumes from mirrors, to stripes to single disks, and back again. But as long as they are mounted, I can not move them at all.

This strikes me as odd - according to the documentation (sparse as it is for the replace function on the evms website) I should be able to do all this moving while the filesystems are mounted, just as easily as i can if they are not mounted. This all uses the "online replace" functionality built into the software.

I really need this because my storage is growing, and moving my main storage volume would require well over 24 hours unmounted, which is not really acceptable.

I read somewhere about online replace checking with other evms plugins before allowing a move to go ahead. So I did some tests with reiserfs, xfs, and ext3 just to make sure it wasn't the main file system (xfs in my case) that was stopping the online move. With any of these 3 filesystems, the replace function was as disabled as ever, as long as the volume was mounted.

Has this functionality been disabled in the gentoo evms ebuilds or something? I can't see any comments that would indicate this in the evms ebuild.

My gentoo system is 2006.1 amd64 running udev-104-r12, evms-2.5.5-r5, kernel 2.6.18.8 from kernel.org (I can't go above 2.6.18 because iscsitarget no longer works) - a relatively fresh and otherwise quite happy system.

Any input from evms gurus out there would be appreciated immensely.