There have been many articles about the downtime issue with Cloudflare last week, so I won’t get into the technical details of that. However, there’s the fine print to remember. Consider this a subtle reminder that core Internet infrastructure services like Cloudflare’s DNS-based “Always Online” caching and packet inspection security services do not come with Service Level Agreements even at the “Pro” account level. Even with a Pro account you are paying for a service with no uptime guarantee and you must only hope that it resolves your sites the majority of the time. This is fine, this is what the contract says: no SLA unless you pay for the Business account. An odd naming convention given that most Professionals are using their websites for business and would want the SLA, but I digress.

So, the SLA is not really the issue if you look at the architectural alternatives to building an architecture that desires availability when …

Congratulations to the openSUSE community on a successful release of openSUSE 12.3. A highlight worth mentioning is that MariaDB is now the default as opposed to MySQL. What are you waiting for, download it!

From the features list, here’s an excerpt focusing on MariaDB & MySQL:

openSUSE has moved from MySQL to MariaDB as default. MariaDB was first shipped with openSUSE 11.3 back in 2010. Over the years it proved itself and starting with 12.3 openSUSE is replacing default MySQL implementation with MariaDB. This means that whole distribution is compiled against MariaDB and in ‘M’ in LAMP means MariaDB from now. As MariaDB is a drop-in …

This is just for testing purposes, but you might want to play around with MariaDB 5.5.29 coming via the CentOS 6 repositories as mentioned in this post. Please test it out and report bugs if required. The process was simple on a fresh install:

yum update
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/6/mariadb/mariadb.repo
yum list mariadb\*
yum install mariadb-server mariadb
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

That’s it, it just works. It comes with MEMORY, CSV, MRG_MYISAM, BLACKHOLE, MyISAM, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, ARCHIVE, FEDERATED, InnoDB (XtraDB) and Aria.

Remember this replaces mysql-libs, and is set to replace MySQL in your install. Here’s hoping it hits mainline CentOS soon.

Related posts:

1. …

I’m going to take the numbers from my previous post, MySQL Modularity, Are We There Yet? for the “kernel” size of MySQL – that is, everything that isn’t a plugin or storage engine.

For Linux kernel, I’m just going to use the a-bit-old git tree I have on my laptop. I’ve decided that the following directories are for “plugins” drivers/ arch/ sound/ firmware/ crypto/ usr/ virt/ tools/ scripts/ fs/*/* and everything else is core kernel code.

Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Scientific Linux 6.3

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Scientific Linux 6.3 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

Building clusters is usually a fun time. Here’s one of my setups at the Equinix LAX1 facility that is being used for VPN services, OpenVZ clustering, and general RADIUS and MySQL clustering integration. Once the clustering design is finalized, it’s still in flux state while I try out different setups, I’ll post some physical+logical architecture diagrams to show “How to Build a Fault Tolerant Infrastructure for Virtualized MySQL NDB Cluster + Python-based VPN systems.” Stay tuned for more.

Percona Server on the Nexus 7: Your own MySQL Database Server on an Android Tablet

Following Roel’s post, Percona Server on the Raspberry Pi: Your own MySQL Database Server , I thought what other crazy gadget can I run Percona Server on? And having an Asus Nexus 7 Android tablet I decided to give it a try.

Anything below contains a risk that you break your tablet if you do not know what you are doing, so be advised.

First, we need rooted tablet, most likely with custom ROM. I personally use …

Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Scientific Linux 6.3 (LAMP)

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Scientific Linux 6.3 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Sometimes we encounter odd application responses that seem to make no sense. One of these such issues is related to running virtual server instances (OS Containers not Para-Virtualized VMs) and attempting to back up their data to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. For moderately sized virtual machines running MySQL databases or Python/PHP based websites and code repositories this can be an inexpensive, quickly provisioned, and easy way to provide disaster recovery backups in numerous geographic locations, since we generally want DR content to be located in a physically distant location. Nevertheless, we can encounter errors if using an S3 mount in a distance location from our server if the timezone/sync data is incorrect.

The commonly seen error is as follows – and it doesn’t give much information for troubleshooting and resolution.

WARNING: Upload failed:  ([Errno 32] Broken pipe)
WARNING: Retrying on lower speed (throttle=0.00) …

EDIT: Video from today’s #DBHangOps!

Hey there peeps!

February 27th at 12:00pm PST it is! Check back here for more info and keep a watchful eye on the twitter search (and feel free to join the conversation!). The topics we’re looking to cover this week are:

• Day-to-day pain points (what takes more time than it should?)
  • rolling restarts and upgrades
  • Performing checksums on your data
    $ /usr/bin/pt-table-checksum \
--quiet \
--ignore-databases=mysql,percona,information_schema,per
formance_schema \
--lock-wait-time=50 \
--chunk-size-limit=0 \
--no-check-plan \
--no-check-binlog-format \
--max-lag=1 \
--replicate percona.checksums \
…