My friend Brian Aker noticed my post from the other day on Ansible and image building had some things in the YAML Ansible playbooks that looked broken. Sure enough, I didn't notice when proofreading that double {{ and }}

curly braces weren't showing up! That was definite breakage but upon verification of the playbook in my repo, it was not broken and I realized that my markdown in my Jekyll-based github pages website/blog had manged the YAML …

This document describes how to setup a FreeRADIUS server. A MySQL server is used as backend and for the user accounting.

RADIUS is an industry-standard protocol for providing authentication, authorization, and accounting services.

• Authentication is the process of verifying a user’s identity and associating additional information (attributes) to the user’s login session.
• Authorization is the process of determining whether the user is allowed on the network and controlling network access values based on a defined security policy.
• Accounting is the process of generating log files that record session statistics used for billing, system diagnosis, and usage planning.

Installation:

Download freeradius source from http://freeradius.org/

tar -xzvf freeradius-server-3.0.3.tar.gz
cd freeradius …

Vagrant is an open source tool for building complete virtual development environment. Very often, test environment is required for testing latest release and new tools. Also, reduces the time spent in re-building OS. By default, it uses virtualbox for managing the Virtualization. Vagrant act as a central place configuration for managing/deploying multiple reproducible virtual environment with the same configuration.

Installing Virtualbox:

$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox

Installing Vagrant:

$ sudo apt-get install vagrant

Install the dkms package to ensure that the VirtualBox host kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt and vboxnetadp) are properly updated if the Linux kernel version changes during the next apt-get …

A much awaited release from the MariaDB project is now stable (GA) – MariaDB Galera Cluster 10.0.12. This is a complete merge of MariaDB 10.0.12 and Galera Cluster, with additional features and bug fixes. This gives you the entire power of Galera Cluster as well as the benefits of all the MariaDB 10 features. 

This is the fourth release in the 10.0 Galera Cluster series, and for more changes, please review the …

In the previous post of this series we saw how you could use mysqlrpladmin to perform manual failover/switchover when GTID replication is enabled in MySQL 5.6. Now we will review mysqlfailover (version 1.4.3), another tool from the MySQL Utilities that can be used for automatic failover.

Summary

• mysqlfailover can perform automatic failover if MySQL 5.6′s GTID-replication is enabled.
• All slaves must use --master-info-repository=TABLE.
• The monitoring node is a single point of failure: don’t forget to monitor it!
…

One of the most frequent questions in our forums is about how to get the graphical integration when using Visual Studio with MySQL databases.

When developing applications with MySQL databases there are two basics products: a .net driver for MySQL, which is MySQL Connector/Net, and a tool to integrate all of the Visual Studio database oriented tools such as the Server Explorer window. These tools are designed to make a lot easier the creation and edition of MySQL databases when using an IDE like Visual Studio.

The MySQL Utilities Team is pleased to announce a new release that contains our newest features – SSL and configuration file support. These were added to release-1.5.0-alpha.

How can I make a secure connection to my server via Utilities?

Use the new SSL command-line options that are available for all utilities:

–ssl-ca : The path to a file that contains a list of trusted SSL certificate authorities.
–ssl-cert : The name of the SSL certificate file to use for establishing a secure connection.
–ssl-key : The name of the SSL key file to use for establishing a secure connection.

Then just specify the appropriate values on the command-line with any other parameters.

How can I use configuration files?

If typing all of those SSL options seems tedious, you can specify this information in your configuration file and reference the file via a new syntax. You can also supply a path to …

I was recently asked about if MySQL Enterprise Backup would be able to restore single databases.

My initial answer was that this was complicated, but might be doable with the Transportable Table Space (TTS) option.

But first let's go back to the basics. A common way of working with mysqldump is to get a list of databases and then loop through the databases and dump the data and schema to a SQL file. But both backups and restores will take a lot of time if the size of the database grows. And it's a luke-warm backup at best instead of a hot backup. So that's why we have MySQL Enterprise Backup.

MySQL Enterprise Backup allows you to make a hot backup of InnoDB tables by copying the datafiles while watching the InnoDB redo log files.

On disk the data from the InnoDB storage engine consists of a system tablespace (one of more ibdataX files), the redo log files (iblogfileX) and zero or more …

MySQL for Visual Studio is a product including all of the Visual Studio integration previously available as part of Connector/Net. The 1.2.1 version is a beta release of this product which is feature complete but still can contain minor bugs and is not suitable for production environments.

Why do we need to recover InnoDB dictionary

c_parser is a tool from TwinDB recovery toolkit that can read InnoDB page and fetch records out of it. Although it can scan any stream of bytes recovery quality is higher when you feed c_parser with pages that belong to the PRIMARY index of the table. All InnoDB indexes have their identifiers a.k.a. index_id. The InnoDB dictionary stores correspondence between table name and index_id. That would be reason number one.

Another reason – it is possible to recover table structure from the InnoDB dictionary. When a table is dropped MySQL deletes respective .frm file. If you had neither backups nor table schema it becomes quite a challenge to recover the table structure. This topic however deserves a separate post which I write some other day.

Let’s assume you’re convinced …