Towards the end of last year, I was asked to investigate the Red Hat Software Collections by someone that popped by one of my talks. SkySQL has been working heavily with Red Hat, and with Fedora 19 shipping MariaDB as a default, it seems like MariaDB is getting even more distribution. The Red Hat Software Collections 1.0 Beta is now available for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

From a database standpoint, users now get MariaDB 5.5. I encourage all to try it, as it is an in-situ upgrade. It is described as:

MariaDB version 5.5, which introduces an easy-to-adopt alternative for MySQL for Red Hat Enterprise …

How-To configure your MySQL to use PAM and/or Active Directory authentication with percona-pam-authentication plugin. Continuing articles about Two-Factor authentication or integrating Linux services with Active Directory, this How-To is one of my recent works that I have done these days, so I hope it may help the community with this guide to configure MySQL with PAM and subsequently using Active Directory to authenticate. If you are new here, please refer to SSH Two-Factor authentication, which explains how to install likewise and integrate your Linux with AD. However, we will have few exceptions to get MySQL working with PAM authentication.

Before you continue, please make sure that you have MySQL 5.5.16 or a newer version, otherwise it can …

Backups is one of the most important part of any MySQL deployment, and nowadays, there’s a number of tools to choose from depending on how your organization implements them. The purpose of this post is to enumerate the main tools and some helpers that makes backing up and testing/restoring your backups more convenient. By all means this is not the complete list, I’m sure I am missing some, so feel free to add them through the comments.

The Core Tools

• mysqldump – is a logical backup tool for MySQL. It creates plain text files with SQL statements which you can directly import back to the server. Some would say mysqldump is not really a backup tool as you cannot get a consistent backup without disrupting operations while the server is running. I’d say this is just a limitation, if your dataset is small …

I am currently working with a large customer and I am involved with servers located in two data centers, one with Solaris servers and the other one with Linux servers. The Solaris side is cleverly setup using zones and ZFS and this provides a very low virtualization overhead. I learned quite a lot about these technologies while looking at this, thanks to Corey Mosher.

On the Linux side, we recently deployed a pair on servers for backup purpose, boxes with 64 300GB SAS drives, 3 raid controllers and 192GB of RAM. These servers will run a few slave instances each of production database servers and will perform the backups.  The write load is not excessive so a single server can easily handle the write load of all the MySQL instances.  The original idea was to configure them with raid-10 + LVM, making sure to …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …

tl;dr:
Make sure you flash an LSI-9211 to IT firmware rev#14 to get it to work 
with Linux and SSD trim.  You may have to downgrade from newer firmware
to older firmware to get the card to work.

Finding a SATA III controller with more than one PCI-e lane
After a recent hardware issue I decided to upgrade my computer to use new Intel 520 120MB SSD drives in RAID for improved performance.  The motherboard I use (an ASUS Rampage III extreme) has a Marvel SATA III controller with two ports, but I discovered that it is connected via only a single PCI-e lane (each lane can do at most 400MB/sec*).  This means that it can't effectively support even a single Intel 520 because one device can saturate the SATA III bus (An Intel 520 is rated at up to 550MB/sec sequential write).

So I went on a quest for a new SATA 3 controller.   To Frys! I exclaimed.  But unfortunately, all the PCI-e 2.x SATA III …

Here’s the recording!

Heyo!

Now that we’ve gone through the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo review and had an amazing turnout to talk about it, it’s time to open up the discussion around things that DBAs want to talk about and need to be conscientious of. Join us on Wednesday at 12:00pm PDT (19:00 GMT) to take part in the discussion and share your knowledge and experience with the following topics:

• Filesystems and MySQL — Which do you use and why?
  • Do you handle I/O alignment? How do you do it?
  • Scheduler changes?
• Nagios checks! — Any new checks you’ve added recently?
• The worst settings in MySQL that you always change
• What are the most important variables to you, and what do you set them to?
• What will be important variables in 5.6 that …

dm-cache is (albeit still classified “experimental”) is in the just released Linux 3.9 kernel. It deals with generic block devices and uses the device mapper framework. While there have been a few other similar tools flying around, since this one has been adopted into the kernel it looks like this will be the one that you’ll be seeing the most in to the future. It saves sysadmins the hassle of compiling extra stuff for a system.

A typical use is for an SSD to cache a HDD. Similar to a battery backed RAID controller, the objective is to insulate the application from latency caused by the mechanical device, the most laggy part of which is seek time (measured in milliseconds). Giventhe  relatively high storage capacity of an SSD (in the hundreds of GBs), this allows you to mostly disregard the mechanical latency for writes and that’s very useful for database systems such as MariaDB.

That covers writes (for the moment), but …

Hey everybody!

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo just wrapped up last week and we’re looking to get some conference in review talk from everyone! Talk about your favorite sessions, new things you learned, and your overall opinion of the conference!

Hop online Wednesday at 12:00pm PDT (19:00 GMT) to join the discussion and share your experience from the 2013 Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo.

Be sure to watch this twitter search or this blog post get a link for the google hangout tomorrow!

Some talks that were specifically called out:

• Monitoring MySQL with OpenTSDB by Geoffrey Anderson
• …

Hi there !

This is the final part of using openconnect  - You can check the older ones below:

http://www.heitorlessa.com/connecting-your-linux-to-a-cisco-anyconnect-ssl-part-1/

http://www.heitorlessa.com/connecting-your-linux-to-a-cisco-anyconnect-ssl-part-2/

As mentioned previously, we will be covering here:

• How to create a script to monitor such VPN using ICMP, and restart that VPN if it is down
  

I would say, this is very straight forward and does not require much knowledge, so we are going to follow the same procedure as part 2 – Show the script in parts and then a …