I really like ZRM for MySQL Community Edition for backups. I find
it very simple to install and configure and it gets the job done. It's default settings suits most installations. The challenges arise once you need to adapt it to more complex organizations. Please note that all the issues described on this article refer to Linux installations.

What If DBAs Have No sudo?

This was the 1st challenge that I ever faced. ZRM requires full root access at least during installation and in some cases, it requires some sudo permissions to be able to manage its files as well. Some organizations don't grant these permissions to the DBAs complicating the installation. When I looked into the scripts, I didn't see any reason why they wouldn't run in the user space, other than a few hard coded paths. I posted the

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To install sudo on a debian or ubuntu system with a bash shell (this is likely you if you're reading this), change to the root user thus:

$ su -

Now that you have a "#" shell, all commands you run will be privileged. You don't want this. Trust me. Instead, you want to run most commands as your usual user and only use privileged commands when you have no other choice. To do this, I recommend installing sudo.

# apt-get install sudo

When this program finishes installing, and you are again presented with a "#" shell, do the last thing you will ever do from that shell. In the following example, "<your username>" represents the username of your non-privileged user.

# echo '<your username>  ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

If you substituted <your username> correctly, you











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