I am happy to announce version 0.4 of mylvmbackup, a tool to perform consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

For this release I'd like to especially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project, who contributed another batch of useful changes and informed me that mylvmbackup is now in productive use to perform backups of the MySQL databases that power the project's Bugzilla bug tracking system. I am always glad to read about such use cases - how do you utilize mylvmbackup in your environment?

• The option handling has been improved. mylvmbackup now starts by using the builtin defaults, followed by the default configuration file (/etc/mylvmbackup.conf, followed by an alternative configuration file (specified via CLI …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Everyone has heard of being slashdotted or maybe dugg. But have you ever been Yahoo!ed?

Phones started beeping, mayhem ensued. The first thing we looked at was the database. Is some MyISAM table locked? Is there a hung log processor running? The database was busy, but it looked odd. The web servers were going nuts.

As we soon discoverd, we (dealnews.com) were mentioned in an article on Yahoo!. At 5Pm Eastern, that article made it to be the featured article on the Yahoo! front page. It was there for an hour. We went from our already high Christmas traffic of about 80 req/s for pages and 200 req/s for images to a 130 req/s for pages and 500 req/s for images. We survived with a little tinkering. We have been working on a …

Recently I stumbled over a posting on the German MySQL Forum from a user that accidentally removed all table files from a MySQL Server's data directory with a misbehaving shell script. He was surprised to find out that the server happily continued to serve requests and his web site was still fully operational, even though /var/lib/mysql/<database> was completely emtpy! The reason for this in a nutshell: the rm command only removed the reference to the table files from the database directory, the files itself were not removed from the file system yet as the mysqld process still had the files opened. So as long as a process keeps a file open, the kernel will not release the disk space occupied by the file and it will remain intact, albeit no longer visible.

Of course, the user was now desperate to recover the deleted tables files and was …

Recently I stumbled over a posting on the German MySQL Forum from a user that accidentally removed all table files from a MySQL Server's data directory with a misbehaving shell script. He was surprised to find out that the server happily continued to serve requests and his web site was still fully operational, even though /var/lib/mysql/<database> was completely emtpy! The reason for this in a nutshell: the rm command only removed the reference to the table files from the database directory, the files itself were not removed from the file system yet as the mysqld process still had the files opened. So as long as a process keeps a file open, the kernel will not release the disk space occupied by the file and it will remain intact, albeit no longer visible.

Of course, the user was now desperate to recover the deleted tables files and was …

Few days ago I’ve started migration of some of my non-critical servers to Debian Etch (from Sarge). Just after first apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, when apt has been upgraded, I noticed really strange (as for me) error: when I’ve tried to do “apt-get update” it worked fine, but there was annoying message like following:

# apt-get update
......
Fetched 5562B in 13s (421B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: There are no public key available for the following key IDs:
A70DAF536070D3A1
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
#

UPDATE: Thanks to Kurt Fitzner we know, that:

There is already a mechanism to do this automatically:

$ apt-key update

This will obtain the necesary keys and import them. No need to go through gpg directly.

After not so …

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …

I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.

After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.

Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code …