I came across the following configuration today on a Production MySQL system (5.0.67) running 30+ blogs using Wordpress MU.

$ cat /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
set-variable = max_connections=500
safe-show-database

No I did not truncate the output. I could say I’ve seen worse, but that’s a stretch.

So the quiz and a prize for the best response, for the next 48 hours I’ll accept your comments as responses to this post for the top 5 settings you would add, and additionally what information you may need to add these settings. Bonus points for giving a reason why you would add the settings as well.

For example, I’ll give you the most obvious.

key_buffer_size = ????

To determine a key_buffer_size to start with I would look at the size of all Indexes via I_S, and combine with some estimate of growth, say 2x-5x.

For the best answer …

"The support model doesn’t scale well." - Matthew Aslett, The 451 Group

How do you make money with open source? I’ve written about open source business models previously, but I thought it might be valuable to quantify the impact of open source on your business model. The following analyzes the differences between a closed source model and an open source + paid support business model, using an apples-to-apples comparison based on a $100 license fee for the closed source product.

Option 1: Closed source
License Fee: $100
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (18%)
5-Year Present Value of License + Support: $175 (1)
Conversion Rate: 100%
Userbase: 1X
Relative Revenue: $175

Option 2: Open source
License Fee: $0
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (2)
5-Year Present …

If you can do either of these on your MySQL production server, you need to correct immediately.

1. Login directly to your MySQL server as the ‘root’ Linux Operating System user. For example:

$ ssh root@server-name
Password:  ************

2. Connect to MySQL database as the ‘root’ MySQL user without a password.

$ mysql -uroot

Here are the 60 second fixes to address these major security flaws.
To disable direct root access to your server, first ensure you can login as a normal user, then su - or sudo su - appropriately. Then, disable ssh root access with the following configuration change.

$   vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
    # ensure this is commented out and set to no
    PermitRootLogin no

$   /etc/init.d/sshd restart

This will stop any brute force attack on your server by automated bots and password generators.

Second, the default installation …

Dear Kettle friends,

Will Gorman and Mike D’Amour, Senior Developers at Pentaho, are presenting Pentaho’s Google integration work at the Google I/O Developer Conference. (at the Sandbox area to be specific)   Yesterday, Pentaho announced that much.

Here are a few of the integration points:

• Google maps dashboard (available in the Pentaho BI server you can download)
• A new Google Docs step was created for Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition
• Running (AVI, 30MB) the …

It may sound odd offering more Zimbra installation advice since there is a lot on the subject in other blogs, our documents, wiki and Forums. In fact, some quick research surfaced over 1.4 million hits for Zimbra server install on the web and 36,000 on the Zimbra site alone.

But we are also fortunate to have more new Zimbra users than ever, and after helping some trial customers recently, it …

As our data warehousing process grows and the workflows get more complex, we've revisited the question of what tools to use in this process. Out of curiosity, I had a look at basing such a process on Hadoop/Hive for scalability reasons, but the lack of mature tools and the sacrifices on efficiency that would entail meant we're better off using something else as long as a distributed processing platform is the only thing that can get the job done. I'm also curious about the transition to continuous integration, a model I noticed showing up a couple of years ago and now getting some air under its wings as CEP, IBM's …

The spirit and intent of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GPL license are right on target. However, we must be careful to ensure that the GPL license is interpreted in a manner fulfills the spirit and intent behind its framing. Richard Stallman and associates set out to draft a license agreement that ensures that free software remains free. They didn’t want to see open source become corrupted with the insertion of proprietary code that would eat away at the freedoms they envisioned.

To protect the eternal purity of the open source software, they created constraints on how proprietary code can interact with the GPL code. Their one weapon in this battle is the automatic and forced expansion of their GPL license to any code that integrates with the base GPLed code. I often refer to this process as acting like a virus. I don’t use this term to infer nefarious intent any more than viral marketing infers nefarious intent. On the …

Peter Zaitsev at Percona has an interesting post today talking about how large companies warp the open source development process, resulting in an increasingly isolationist development model from their corporate benefactors. He rightly highlights one motive driving this behavior, namely the desire of marketing to make a big splash with a critical mass of enhancements/fixes that, when bundled together, become worthy of media attention. He rightly bemoans this situation from the perspective of the developer.

There are a few more factors influencing this process and their root causes are found in the maturation of the project and the demands of both users and the different groups inside a corporation. Much of this can be mapped to the stages defined in the book Crossing the …

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

As I write this, my friend (and eLiberatica chair) Lucian is packing up to fly to Bucharest for this year’s instance of the eLiberatica Electronic Frontier/Free Software/Open Source conference. Sadly, I won’t be participating this year – a commitment to less travel and a new venture make doubly sure that I’m staying home.

Despite the downturn, it looks like this is going to be a great year for the conference: 400 people have registered and the list of speakers is formidable, including: OSI board member Danese Cooper, FSFE founder Georg Greve, MySQL founders David Axmark and Monty Widenius and Zbigniew “Gandalf” Branecki from Mozilla Europe.

If you are in or near Romania, you should try to …