Create a RAID 1 Array with an Existing Drive
So, last month the IT department at DIRC was made redundant due to funding issues (The joys of working for the not-for-profit sector), as a result myself and colleague David were out of a job. If you’re looking for a new media consultant, Dave’s your man.
Luckily, after a weeks vacation and procrastinating about updating my resume / beginning to find a new source of income to cover my rent, I was offered a new job at http://www.tobacco.net.au – Cheap Cigarettes made in Australia. The work’s completely different, so it’s a great new learning curve, and hopefully the addictive qualities of nicatine should keep me in a job! 
I’ve got a new HP DL585 server that I’m using for development, and let me say, this thing is a beast. I set it up about 2 weeks ago with Fedora Core 10, but the problem was all our hard drives didn’t arrive with the server, and I needed to get it up and running. I needed to create a RAID 1 mirror of the 36GB 15k SAS system drive but only had 1 of the drives.
This morning, the second drive arrived and I had to figure out how to create a mirror of the existing drive, without having to reinstall the entire OS again or lose any data. Thanks to the power of the command line it made light work of a seemingly daunting problem.
First, create an image of your drive onto another temporary drive:
Mount a partition to store the backup image of the system drive, in this case I used /dev/cciss/c0d1p1
mkdir /media/backup
mount -t ext3 /dev/cciss/c0d1p1 /media/backup
Create an image of the drive you’re wanting to use for the RAID array (/dev/cciss/c0d0)
dd bs=4k if=/dev/cciss/c0d0 of=/media/backup/backup.img conv=noerror,sync
Secondly, install the new drive being used as the mirror and create the RAID 1 array using the controller.
Finally, reboot with the Fedora CD in the drive and enter recovery mode. Just skip past any menus that come up until you’re presented with a command prompt.
Now mount the partition with the backup image
mkdir /mnt/backup
mount -t ext3 /dev/cciss/c0d1p1 /mnt/backup
Restore the system drive
dd bs=4k if=/mnt/backup/backup.img of=/dev/cciss/c0d0
Once complete, take the Fedora CD out of the drive and reboot, and the system should be like you never touched it.
This new job has me doing 12 hour days when including travel to and from, so I’ve barely had time to myself. When I get a few days off, I’ll try and get a new update on Flickr Manager pushed out.
What’s new in Flickr Manager 2.3
In this latest installment of Flickr Manager, you may have noticed some changes to the media panel. The first change is the separation of the browse panel into two separate tabs, “My Photos”, “My Photosets”. Secondly, a new option to hide the licensing information when browsing public photos allows for more photos to be displayed per page, as seen below:
The method for insertion of images has changed to give you greater control over your Flickr photos. The save button will update the photo information directly on Flickr. When inserting a photo, the title field will reflect the caption to be displayed in the Lightbox or Highslide overlay (No save is necessary for this to take effect).
Finally this update includes some security updates which address several vulnerabilities, and it’s highly recommended that you upgrade.
Flickr Manager I18N
To bring in the new year, I bring you Flickr Manager 2.1. The updated version contains a number of bug fixes, interface revamps, but the main new feature is the support for internationalization.
EDIT:
A Launchpad translation project has been setup: Click here to view a list of all currently available translations. Very briefly, Launchpad will enable a community of translators to help translate the plugin into whatever language is needed.
How to translate with Launchpad
- Setup a Launchpad.net account.
- Select your preferred languages. This will be the language you want to translate.
- You should see your language show up in this list. Simply click the name to get started with the translations. The system will try to offer suggests where available (retrieved from other open source projects).
- Your translations are saved as you proceed. When it comes time to package a release, your translation will be automatically included in the release for everyone to use. Thanks for your help!
WFM Update
WordPress Flickr Manager 2.0 has been released.
I’ve created a new page here that will contain all future updates and information about the plugin.
Thanks,
Trent
Flickr Manager gets photo sets in 1.5.0
In this final release of 1.5.0 I’ve added photo set support that allows you to browse your personal photo sets as well as take advantage of the Lightbox photo set functionality when inserting photos into posts. An example:
Also PHP 5 is now required to use this plugin otherwise you’ll receive the following error:
ERROR: You’re currently running 4.x.x and you must have at least PHP 5 in order to use Flickr Manager!
If you don’t have PHP 5 and have no way of installing it I believe version 1.4.5 will still function in some of the later releases of PHP 4.
The new Browse Panel
Flickr Manager gets a new Framework
So some of you may have noticed already that yesterday I released version 1.5.0a of my Flickr Manager plugin. The main point of this version update was because of all the development that’s been going on lately, the code has been getting rather thrown together and confusing, so I’ve restructured and rewritten most of the code to make it easier to understand and develop future releases. Because of such a major overhaul a few bugs may have slipped through so this is the reason for releasing it as an alpha. So please if you try the new release of the plugin and are experiencing problems let me know with as many details as possible. Otherwise if you’re not game enough to try out the new version please revert back to 1.4.5 (available here).
I’ve also added a “Limit size of images in the browse window” option, which keeps all the images in the browse panel to maintain a constant size of either square or thumbnail depending on your preference to save loading times.
WFM 1.4.5 – Lightbox 2 Support
WordPress Flickr Manager’s latest release now supports Lightbox 2. I’ve also added new “Optional Settings” such as “Enable lightbox support by default” and “Default lightbox picture”, which lets you specify a default size of the image being displayed by Lightbox.
The ‘Browse Photos’ panel has had a bit of a face lift, it now allows for more solid control over inserted Lightbox elements such as specifying the Flickr image size to be displayed in Lightbox from picture to picture.
If you’ve got a suggestion that you’d like to see in a future version of Flickr Manager, let me know.
WordPress Plugin Updater Beta Test!
Today I have a little surprise for all of you, I’ve written a new plugin which I find extremely useful, I’ve dubbed it “Plugin Updater”. Not the most imaginative name, I know. Once it’s installed it adds a new button to the plugin update notification bar, shown in the image to the right.
When you click the “Update Now” button it will automatically download the update from WordPress extend and extract it to your plugins directory.
Installation instructions:
- Upload the folder `plugin-updater` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
- CHMOD 777 /wp-content/plugins
- CHMOD 777 /wp-content/plugins/plugin-updater/packages
- Activate the plugin through the `Plugins` menu in WordPress.
This isn’t an official release, I’ve still got a lot of testing to do so I’m not offering any support.
If you find any bugs it would be greatly appreciated if you let me know.
NOTE: There’s a known conflict issue with my “Flickr Manager” plugin, which I’ve since had to patch, so if you’re experiencing troubles with it not doing anything when you click the “Update Now” button, please redownload Flickr Manager (or deactivate and click “Update Now” for versions earlier than 1.4.01).
Wordpress Flickr Manager now with Lightbox Support
It’s a bit of a rushed release because I’m pretty busy at the moment, so I didn’t have time to test it as much as I would have liked. I introduced a couple new features to Flickr Manager in this release, the main one being optional Lightbox support. You’ll notice now on the “Browse Photos” tab an added “Insert with lightbox support” check box. When this is selected, the inserted image will display the Medium Flickr sized copy of the photo in the Lightbox window. This means if you insert a square, thumbnail or small image it will display a larger version when viewing the Lightbox image. It also allows you to specify which images load with Lightbox and which don’t. For Example:
I’m boring and just take you to Flickr
Also another feature I added was if you don’t have cURL installed on your web host it will now use fopen instead.
NOTE: File uploads to Flickr won’t work unless you have cURL installed. So if everything is working except uploads, you must install cURL!
Like I said earlier, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to test this so I’m releasing it as a beta. If you find any errors, please let me know. Thanks.