Recently, we were affected by an ignored configuration option introduced in MySQL 5.6. This incident caused us to perform extended planning of downtime and the rebuilding of the slave. In this post, we’ll discuss our encounter with binlog_error_action and likely bad default.

The incident started with an alert from our monitoring platform that a check failed to verify a MySQL master’s binary log coordinates. My colleague working from the other side of the globe observed the following:

mysql> show master status;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show binary logs;
ERROR 1381 (HY000): You are not using binary logging

Interestingly, the MySQL slave was still reporting that everything was okay!

mysql> show slave status\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
               Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
                  Master_Host: master
                  Master_User: …