October 17, 2014 By Severalnines

Integrating ClusterControl with a corporate LDAP directory is a common task for many IT organizations. In an earlier blog, we showed you how to integrate ClusterControl with OpenLDAP. In this post, we will show you how to integrate with FreeIPA and Windows Active Directory. 

How ClusterControl Performs LDAP Authentication

ClusterControl supports up to LDAPv3 protocol based on RFC2307. More details on this in the documentation.

When authenticating, ClusterControl will first bind to the directory tree server (LDAP …

Multi-source replication for MySQL has been released as a part of 5.7.5-labs-preview
downloadable from labs.mysql.com. It is one among the several features that are
cooking in the replication technologies at MySQL.  (For a birds eye view of all
replication features introduced in 5.7 and labs, look  at the blog posts here and here.

Previously, we have introduced a preliminary multi-source feature labs preview. Based on the feed back from that labs release, we …

I recently had a client ask me how to use Percona Toolkit tools with an SSL connection to MySQL (MySQL-SSL). SSL connections aren’t widely used in MySQL due to most installations being within an internal network. Still, there are cases where you could be accessing MySQL over public internet or even over a public “private” network (ex: WAN between two colo datacenters). In order to keep packet sniffers at bay, the connection to MySQL should be encrypted.

If you are connecting to Amazon RDS from home or office (ie: not within the AWS network) you better be encrypted!

As there is already a MySQL Performance Blog post on how to setup MySQL SSL connections, we can skip that and dive right in.

As you probably know, the mysql client …

In a few weeks I’m presenting “Performance Benchmarking: Tips, Tricks, and Lessons Learned” at Percona Live London 2014 (November 3-4). I continue to learn lessons and improve my benchmarking capabilities, so the content is a full upgrade from my presentation at Percona Live Santa Clara in April 2013. Anyone interested in achieving and sustaining the best performance out of their software/hardware/application should attend.

Also, Tokutek is sponsoring so we’ll be available in the expo hall throughout the show.

If you are attending or in the area and want to learn more about …

In the new InnoDB lab release we support page sizes of 32k and 64k. This gives users even more choices on the page size, allowing you to further customize InnoDB for your particular workload.

There are some things worthy of note related to this new feature:

1. The extent size changes when the innodb_page_size is set 32k or 64k.
   The extent size is 2M for 32k page sizes, and 4M for 64k page sizes (the extent size is 1M for 4k, 8k, and 16k page sizes). If we do not enlarge the extent size then we will have too many extent headers on the allocation bitmap page, and the bitmap page will overflow.
2. The …

I still get asked about the lost+found directory enough, and so I wanted to provide a current update.

The lost+found directory is a filesystem directory created at the root level of a mapped drive. Thus this is common to see if you create your mysql datadir at the root level of a mapped drive.

In the past, you could ignore it, if it wasn’t too problematic for you, or you could move your datadir down a level, and then it wouldn’t be created in the datadir anymore.

However, there is now the –ignore-db-dir option. It is actually not too new (it’s been in MariaDB since 5.3.9 and 5.5.28, and in MySQL as of 5.6.3), but I don’t think many are too familiar with it.

But when you do run into this problem, some/many would prefer to add a single line to the config file rather than move the datadir.

To do this, just add the following option to your my.cnf file, under the [mysqld] section (it cannot be set …

I have recently posted up benchmarks of libAttachSQL vs. libmysqlclient using sysbench. Whilst these are great and shows the results I hoped for, this isn't what we designed libAttachSQL for. It was designed for non-blocking many connections per thread.

With this in mind I spent today knocking up a quick benchmark tool which replicates the Sysbench "Select" test but using libAttachSQL's connection groups on a single thread. The code for this can be seen in the new AttachBench GitHub tree. Of course the secondary reason for this is to try and hammer the connection groups feature, which of course did find a bug when I scaled to around 32 connections. This has been fixed in libAttachSQL's master ready for …

Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption

First off, the naming “convention” as of late for security issues has been terrible. The newest vulnerability (CVE­-2014-3566) is nicknamed POODLE, which at least is an acronym and as per the header above has some meaning.

The summary of this issue is that it is much the same as the earlier B.E.A.S.T (Browser Exploit Against SSL TLS), however there’s no known mitigation method in this case – other than entirely disabling SSLv3 support, in short, an attacker has a vector by which they can retrieve the plaintext form your encrypted streams.

So let’s talk mitigation, the …

Founded in 1998, Rackspace has evolved over the years to address the way customers are using data – and more specifically, databases. The San Antonio-based company is fueling the adoption of cloud computing among organizations large and small.

Today Rackspace is doubling down on open source database technologies. Why? Because that’s where the industry is heading, according to Sean Anderson, Manager of Data Services at Rackspace. The company, he said, created a separate business unit of 100+ employees focused solely on database workloads.

The key technologies under the hood include both relational databases (e.g., MySQL, Percona Server, and MariaDB) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis, and Apache Hadoop).

Last July Rackspace …

It has been just over 4 months since I started working on libAttachSQL for HP's Advanced Technology Group. Today marks the first (and hopefully only) RC release of the library.

Connection Groups

The only real new feature that has been added to 0.9.0 is the concept of connection groups which is something I'm pretty excited about. Internally libAttachSQL uses event loops to supply the non-blocking API. Connection Groups join a bunch of connections together into a group that uses a single event loop. This makes things much more efficient internally and makes applications easier to code too.

Here is a simplified example of how to use it (for a more detailed example see our example in the documentation).

First we need to create the group and add connections to …