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The EVMS Engine consists of all the user-space administration tools, libraries and plugins for EVMS.

1. Apply Update Patches

   If you downloaded any update-patches for the EVMS tools, they should be applied now, before configuring and building the tools. The top of each patch file contains a description of the patch, when and why it is necessary, and instructions on how to apply the patch to the source tree.

2. Configure EVMS

   cd /usr/src/evms-2.5.5/ ./configure [--options]

   Select the appropriate options for your configuration. Some of the more important ones are listed here. If you do not specify any options to the ./configure command, the most appropriate settings for your system will be used.

   --prefix=dir

   
   The default installation path is /.

   --libdir=dir

   
   The directory to install the main engine and dlist libraries. The default path is ${prefix}/lib. The EVMS plugin libraries will be installed in the evms subdirectory of this path.

   --sbindir=dir

   
   The directory to install all EVMS user-interface binaries. The default path is ${prefix}/sbin.

   --disable-"plugin-name"

   
   By default, all EVMS plug-ins are compiled (unless a plug-in has dependencies that are not satisfied on the building machine). This option allows the user to remove one or more plug-ins from the build. Acceptable options for "plugin-name" are: bbr, bbr_seg, bsd, csm, disk, dos, drivelink, ext2, fat, gpt, ha, hb2, jfs, lvm, lvm2, mac, md, multipath, ntfs, ocfs2, ogfs, reiser, replace, rsct, s390, snapshot, swap, and xfs

   --disable-"interface-name"

   
   By default, all EVMS user interfaces are compiled (unless an interface has dependencies that are not satisfied on the building machine). This option allows the user to remove one or more interfaces from the build. Acceptable options for "interface-name" are: cli, gui, text-mode, and utils

   --with-debug

   
   Include extra debugging information when building EVMS. This option is only necessary if you intend to run EVMS within a debugger.

   --with-efence

   
   Specify this if the engine should be linked with the ElectricFence memory-debugging library. You must have libefence installed on your system for this option to work.

   --with-static-glib

   
   Specify this if the text-mode UI should be statically linked against the glib and panel libraries. This should make it possible to run evmsn without /usr being mounted.

3. Build and Install EVMS

   After the engine is configured, use the following commands to build and install the tools.

   make make install ldconfig

   Unless you specified other directories, the following list describes where files will be installed on your system:

   • The core Engine library will be installed in /lib.
   • All plug-in libraries will be installed in /lib/evms/2.5.5/.
   • All user interface binaries will be installed in /sbin.
   • The EVMS man pages will be installed in /usr/man/man8.
   • The EVMS header files will be installed in /usr/include/evms.
   • The EVMS configuration file will be installed in /etc.
   • The EVMS failover script will be installed in /etc/ha.d/resource.d
     (Only applicable when building the HA plugin).

   If you specified your own installation path, you will need to add the Engine library path to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, or to your /etc/ld.so.conf file. Do not add the plug-in library path because the Engine will dynamically load these libraries directly.

4. Edit the Configuration File

   Use your favorite text editor to examine the EVMS configuration file, located at /etc/evms.conf. This file contains settings to control how EVMS operates. For example, the logging level, the location of the engine log, and the list of disk devices to examine can all be controlled through settings in the configuration file. The sample file is well commented, and will advise you of appropriate values for each setting.

   The configuration file is normally installed as /etc/evms.conf. However, if you already have a configuration file from a previous version of EVMS, the new one will be installed as /etc/evms.conf.sample. You should examine the new sample to see if your existing file should be updated.

5. Check For Virtual Filesystems

   EVMS requires the procfs filesystem to be mounted on /proc in order to find the Device-Mapper driver. By now, all distributions should automatically mount /proc at boot-time, so this probably isn't an issue for you.

   However, when running on a 2.6 kernel, EVMS also requires that the sysfs filesystem be mounted in order to get information about the disks on your system. Sysfs is the new virtual-filesystem that provides information about the devices and drivers on your system. It is similar to procfs, and the generally-agreed-upon-location for mounting sysfs is /sys. However, most distros do not yet automatically mount this filesystem, so you will probably want to add a new entry for it to your /etc/fstab file. The procfs and sysfs entries in /etc/fstab should look something like this:

   proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0

6. Start EVMS

   Now that the tools have been installed (and if you have booted your Device-Mapper-enabled kernel), you can begin using EVMS by using one of the following commands.

   • evmsgui (to start the graphical interface)

   • evmsn (to start the text-mode interface)

   • evms (to start the command-line interface)

7. Install the Device-Mapper library and tools

   EVMS does not rely on the Device-Mapper user-space library or command-line tools, but they can come in very handy in debugging situations. However, the Device-Mapper library is required if you are using LILO as your boot-loader and your /boot directory is on an EVMS volume (see the Configuring Your Boot-Loader chapter for more details). Thus, we recommend you install this library and tool so they are available in the (hopefully unlikely) event that you need to report a problem with EVMS.

   To install libdevmapper and dmsetup, please see the INSTALL file in the /usr/src/device-mapper.1.01.05/ directory for full instructions. However, the standard build and install can usually be performed with the following commands.

   cd /usr/src/device-mapper.1.01.05/ ./configure make make install ./scripts/devmap_mknod.sh