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I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.
When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too.
[Read more...]The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com
I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.
When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am
[Read more...]
First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !
To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.
Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please, let me a comment with details.
Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
[Read more...]Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.
I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.
From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical
[Read more...]Novell sold to Attachmate. Barnes & Noble throws the book at Microsoft. And more.
Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”
# Novell closed its acquisition by Attachmate and its patent sale to CPTN.
# Attachmate’s CEO discussed the company’s plans for SUSE Linux.
# Barnes & Noble
[Read more...]Inspired by Baron's earlier post, here is one I hear quite frequently -
"If you enable innodb_file_per_table, each table is it's own .ibd file. You can then relocate the heavy hit tables to a different location and create symlinks to the original location."
There are a few things wrong with this advice:
The Problem
Developers often need to have a development database copy of the live production system you are using in able to allow them to test their code and to test new functionality and make schema changes to the database for this new functionality to work.
That’s normal and happens everywhere. A typical DBA task is to make a copy of the live system, sometimes to remove any confidential or sensitive information which perhaps the development database users should not be able to see, and then give them access to this development instance. The developers then “hack away”, changing their code and perhaps things in the database until they are ready to put these new changes into production when they then come along and discuss how to apply these changes into the live systems.
Once the
[Read more...]If you need to work with LVM in your scripts but haven’t found a good method to access details about Logical Volume Groups, here’s a simple Python script that will print the details about any volumes on your system. This could be useful for writing a partition check script for your MySQL data directory (if you’re not using a standard monitoring system like Nagios).
import sys
import os
import commands
import subprocess
import select
def lvm():
print ""
LVM_PATH = "/sbin"
LVM_BIN = os.path.join(LVM_PATH, 'lvm')
argv = list()
argv.append(LVM_BIN)
argv.append("lvs")
argv.append("--nosuffix")
argv.append("--noheadings")
argv.append("--units")
argv.append("b")
argv.append("--separator")
argv.append(";")
argv.append("-o")
argv.append("lv_name,vg_name,lv_size")
process = subprocess.Popen(argv, [Read more...]
I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.13 has now been released. This release includes a fix for a nasty bug in on of the recently added Perl hooks (precleanup.pm) and some added functionality (better support for remote rsync backups).
From the ChangeLog:
You can do all sorts of magic with LVM, like backing up MySQL using file system snapshots, but in order to do so you need to set it first. When installing a new computer with Suse Linux I found that this was harder than expected, unless you know what to do. Needless to say, I didn't, but some friends gave me a hand on IRC, and now I do. :-)
So I wrote a little article about this which you can find here, in an effort to save others some time. The article is about setting up LVM with Suse Yast, but you can probably use it for other flavors of Linux, too.
You can do all sorts of magic with LVM, like backing up MySQL using file system snapshots, but in order to do so you need to set it first. When installing a new computer with Suse Linux I found that this was harder than expected, unless you know what to do. Needless to say, I didn't, but some friends gave me a hand on IRC, and now I do. :-)
So I wrote a little article about this which you can find here, in an effort to save others some time. The article is about setting up LVM with Suse Yast, but you can probably use it for other flavors of Linux, too.
After a long hiatus, I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.12 has now been released. This release includes a large number of improvements, minor code cleanups, as well as some new functionality. In particular, I would like to thank Matthew Boehm, Tim Stoop, Baron Schwartz, Ville Skyttä and Ronald Bradford for their contributions.
Some notable highlights from the ChangeLog:
My calendar for the upcoming months is already filling up with conferences, trade fairs and other events at which I'll speak about MySQL. Here's a quick overview:
This Thursday (February 26th, 14:00 UTC), Lenz Grimmer will give a MySQL University session on Backing up MySQL using file system snapshots. Lenz is a member of the MySQL Community team and the maintainer of the mylvmbackup tool. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data
files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and
flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume
containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The
snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the
Some days ago, I released version 0.11 of mylvmbackup a Perl script that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server by using LVM filesystem snapshots. The source archive as well as a generic RPM can be found on the project home page, packages for many Linux distributions are available on the openSUSE Build service.
This release includes some new functionality as well as numerous bug fixes and improvements, most notably:
Some days ago, I released version 0.11 of mylvmbackup a Perl script that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server by using LVM filesystem snapshots. The source archive as well as a generic RPM can be found on the project home page, packages for many Linux distributions are available on the openSUSE Build service.
This release includes some new functionality as well as numerous bug fixes and improvements, most notably:
Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb
There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim. 
I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and
[Read more...]I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.
You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.
This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:
I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.
You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.
This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:
I am happy to announce that a new version (0.9) of mylvmbackup has been released. This is the first release since the source code has been moved from Subversion to Bazaar and is now hosted on Launchpad.net. I would like to thank Robin H. Johnson and Patrick Hahn for providing the patches that contributed to this new release!
mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup
[Read more...]JFYI: today I migrated the mylvmbackup source tree from my local Subversion repository on http://www.lenzg.org/ to a Bazaar repository on Launchpad.net.
This will hopefully make it easier for contributors to work on the code and share their modifications with others, removing me as the bottleneck for applying and testing patches for new releases. I chose Bazaar primarily because I wanted to get some more hands-on practice with it, now that the MySQL Server source trees have been transferred to it as well (see Kaj's announcement for
[Read more...]JFYI, I now placed a PDF of my MySQL Conference talk slides about "Performing MySQL backups using Linux LVM Snapshots" on my MySQL talks page. Enjoy!
While reading Colin's post about LugRadio Live, I stumbled over the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Going through the project home page and their HOWTO got me curious - could this eventually become an alternative to using DRBD (for replicating data) and LVM snapshots (for performing backups)?
[Read more...]Zumastor is Free software that adds enterprise storage features (primarily improved snapshots and remote replication) to Linux.
Snapshots
LVM already lets administrators create snapshots, but its design has the surprising property that every block you change on the original volume consumes one block for each snapshot.
I am happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.8. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.
Below is the list of changes since version 0.6. You may wonder what happened to version 0.7 - it had a rather short life cycle as I was informed about a bug that I fixed quickly before I made a wider release announcement of 0.7.
I recently received a review copy of the book "Xen Virtualization" by Prabhakar Chaganti (Packt Publishing) and finished reading it a few days ago.
The subtitle "A fast and practical guide" is a matching description - I managed to read the ~130 pages over the course of a week. The book is by no means an exhaustive reference manual, but it gives the reader a good overview about Xen and assists with performing the first steps and getting started.
I am happy to announce that I have been selected to speak at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008 on April 14-17, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. The topic of my talk will be "Performing MySQL Backups using LVM Snapshots" - and I will of course include a plug for the mylvmbackup tool 
From the abstract:
Modern Linux distributions provide a very advanced technology to maintain and administer storage devices, called “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM). Among[Read more...]
Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.
In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!
[Read more...]Attached is a patch file for mylvmbackup that adds the ability to use
lvm version 2 and perform innodb recovery on the snapshot prior to
creating a tar ball. The option is named --innodb-recover.
I've also fixed a bug with default value handling for command line
options. In version 0.4 if a config file was specified default values
in the script were all changed to blank. This means that the config
file had to supply values for every variable instead of just the
values that need
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