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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!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix …

sysbench - Linux test bench. Easy as pie to test CPU, memory, threads, mysql, and disk performance.

Full description is available here: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/docs/

install mysql, mysql-devel
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sysbench/sysbench-0.4.8.tar.gz
tar xvzf sysbench*gz
cd sysbench*
./configure && make install

mysql tests

This will run 10 separate consecutive mysql tests using an InnoDB table type, each with 100 mysql threads, doing a total of 1000 various SQL operations per test. Then it will print the total time they took to finish:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test \\
  --mysql-host='HOST' --mysql-table-engine=innodb prepare
 
time perl -e "foreach(1..10){print \`sysbench --max-requests=1000 --test=oltp \\
  --mysql-user=USER …

Recently I had one customer for consulting and aside from mysql optimization, etc they asked me for cacti installation/setup to monitor their pretty generic LAMP application. I’ve started setting up all this stuff and I’ve never thought it could be so painful… lots of different templates for the same tasks, all of them are incompatible with recent cacti releases, etc, etc… So, this post is generally a list of used templates with a fixes I’ve made to make them work on recent cacti release.

(more…)

This weekend I was doing some development for one of our projects and we needed to make screenshots of a web pages (see my next posts about this task). I’ve managed to develop small piece of code which uses GtkMozEmbed component (Mozilla Gecko-based renderer for web pages) to create screenshots of any page, but there was some problem… The problem was a following: GTK+ library can’t work w/o fully-functional X server running on your machine. Obviously I didn’t want to run such software (no monitor/keyboard/mouse, dumb graphics adapter on the server, etc, etc) so I’ve tried to find some solution… And in this tiny article I’ll describe the method I’ve managed to find.

(more…)

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Seklos just posted a story on his Oracle blog on how he installed Oracle 10something in less than an hour.

I found the story hilarious. why . because about a decade ago .. when I was still into database & webdevelopment, Oracle first started shipping Oracle for Linus (somewhere in 99)
Back then some collegue had been struggling for a couple of days already to setup up Oracle on a Windows box and was thinking to just use SQL server.
So I went home found the famous CD with the typo (or did I really get the CD that should have been shipped to Finland ?) in my mailbox and as I had a new Siemens Server sitting in my basement, I installed a fresh RedHat and on a machine I never had seen before (that's the ninetees I`m talking about so no fancy just install it on most common hardware and it will work like we have these days) and then went on installing an Oracle …

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