07.27.05

creating favicons

Posted in web dev at 2:48 pm by Clinton

At wikipedia there is a very nice page explaining the origin (MS) and current standards (link tags with rel=”shortcut icon” or rel=”icon”), including the fact the ico format has now been registered by microsoft with IANA so it now has a valid MIME type.

The wikipedia links had some links of interest, but not what i wanted - a simple ico conversion program. Nothing fancy. Google - bingo! … and its a good one.
png2ico eh? by Matthias Benkmann (2002) hmm…
http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/

I downloaded the “windows package” (aka zip file) that had the compiled program and a few docs. Didn’t read the notes… just gave it a burl.

c:\>temp\png2ico favicon.ico mynewicon.png

Works just like the box says. There are other web based icon programs out there, and GUI’s for this one I know, but I like this one just fine at the command line.

It’s a simple program, does one task, and does it well. Just what i wanted.

07.26.05

upset raid1

Posted in linux at 2:15 pm by Clinton

Setup:
2 x 80GB ATA HDD
Debian linux, 2.6.8… customised kernel (testing/stable)
Software raid1
ext3

We had 4 power drops last night. My second-hand UPS ($0) ain’t what it used to be.. something must have happened. investigation time.

Going over the logs (/var/log/messages) i saw that the server rebooted fine after the first power failure (5:35 am), and both disks were okay in the array on reboot.

At 6:07am the power fails again, the battery hasn’t charged fully - hard fail. :(

6:09am power returns. Server reboots automatically, and…

md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: considering hdc1 ...
md:  adding hdc1 ...
md:  adding hda1 ...
md: created md0
md: bind
md: bind
md: running:
md: kicking non-fresh hda1 from array!
md: unbind
md: export_rdev(hda1)
raid1: raid set md0 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors
md: ... autorun DONE.

“non-fresh” eh? Whatever the hell that means… google time.

long story short.
After checking that the disk was okay with smartctl and hdparm I ended up typing
mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md0 /dev/hda1
and was told to go away because /dev/ md0 was already assembled. (Oh yeah. right).
So then i used
mdadm -a /dev/hd0 /dev/hda1
which worked! and the array started to rebuild the hda1partition. Then
watch -n 60 cat /proc/mdstat
just to keep track of progress. ~40mins later, all sync’ed. nice.