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)?

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. The resulting speed and space penalty …

Ok, this blog is currently hosted by 1and1.com, and I think that needs to change, which is sad, because up until recently, I’ve been pretty happy with the performance. However, I recently had an issue, and some things came to light about my package that I wasn’t aware of.

First of all, the maximum time a process can run is about 6 seconds. Second of all, the maximum number of processes you can have running at once is 12. When I asked if this was a limitation of my *package*, the answer I got was that it was a limitation of all shared hosting accounts.

This blog started throwing 500 errors some time yesterday. I called support late last night and some lady said that she was running a tool that should fix my issue, and to call back in 30 minutes if the problem persists. Well, I’m sick as a dog, and it was late, so I went to bed. This morning, the problem was still there. I called support 3 times today, got cut off twice, and …

The solidDB for MySQL database engine for MySQL may have lost its sponsor following IBM’s acquisition of Solid Info Tech but events at this week’s MySQL Conference and Expo prove the certified engines program is alive and well.

Not only has Oracle announced that its Innobase subsidiary has updated InnoDB transactional storage engine, but there is also a new member of the certified engines program.

Kickfire has recently …

The very brave soul, was Aaron Bockover, from the Banshee media player fame (via the LugRadio Live USA 2008 weblog). There were a few interesting highlights from these gong-a-thong sessions…

Zumastor
Dan Kegel spoke about the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Want snapshots and remote replication in your Linux filesystem? This one does just that. From the contributor list, it looks like its all Google engineers hacking on this… Yes, this is better than LVM. No, I haven’t tried it yet.

mod_ndb
J.D. Duncan spoke about mod_ndb. Here are my transcribed notes of the talk.

MySQL Cluster is a database designed to be fault tolerant, on cheap commodity hardware. Write SQL queries, and they access the …

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.

• Fixed a bug in the InnoDB recovery function: the second mysqld process …

Earlier this week I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, serendipitously held here Austin.  It was a fantastic opportunity to meet a lot of the people in the community whom I hadn't met before as well as to catch up with old friends.

 
Maddog (R) helping Executive Director Jim "Led" Zemlin to Flourish 

Great Speakers
(and I'm not talking Bose, which really aren't great speakers anyway)

There was an impressive line up of panels and speakers the first day of the summit …

“The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source,” wrote Matt Asay earlier this week. It was a throwaway point but one that I think deserves more attention.

It occurred to me that “how” rather than “why” is the most significant question that open source vendors and projects should be answering right now as they try to encourage greater adoption of open source software.

There can’t be a CIO or IT director left on the planet that hasn’t either asked or been told why they should deploy open source software. They are either inclined towards believing the claims of theoretical benefits or they’re not. How many have asked or been told how they can take advantage of open source software?

Certainly those that are convinced or intrigued by the potential benefits will have gone on to explore …

All production servers are normally installed using kickstart files. Unfortunately, the ks file had a bug that it didnt add a swap partition if there was only one logical or physical disk.

Once the database was setup without swap, the configuration was sized such that all processes fit into memory. But we started seeing OOM killing processes due to lack of memory. Though under normal conditions we had 1-2 GB of free memory.

Unfortunately, OOM at times picked to kill mysql. We were running 500GB+ database having myisam tables. We ended up having to repair the tables every time OOM felt like killing mysqld . Adding a swap device might help us fix the issue, but for that we might have to resize the logical/physical partitions, which wasn’t cool. Then this following idea popped up, create a file, format it as swap and add it as swap device dynamically and also add it /etc/fstab to survive reboot.

dd …

I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:

Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?

With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.

The …

It is interesting to read RedmondDeveloper News’s take on Oracle’s attitude to open source this morning, especially this paragraph quoting Monica Kumar, Oracle’s senior director for Linux and open source product marketing:

“”We haven’t seen our customers asking for open source databases,” she told me. “Not many customers are interested in looking into the code and mucking around with it, and making changes to it. All they care about is ‘give me the best support, give me the lowest price of entry’.” For that Kumar pointed to Oracle Express.”

It is difficult to disagree with the second part of Monica’s statement. Cost savings are routinely cited as the biggest driver for open source database adoption, while the lack of robust support is the biggest barrier to open source adoption.

Certainly these were the findings of our …