Homo-Adminus Blog

I’m returned from my 1-week vacation today and want to say – I’ve never been so productive as I was there 😉 Blue ocean, hot sun and white sand really helped me to finish my work on the first release of one really awesome project.

Today I’m proud to announce our first public release of the Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB – set of tools for checking InnoDB tablespaces and recovering data from damaged tablespaces or from dropped/truncated InnoDB tables.

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Today I was working on one small consulting task and our client asked for an upgrade from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1. It was pretty easy and task was successfully finished and reported to the customer… But few hours after my report I’ve got an email from customer with something like “WTF? Where is my 5.1?!”. I was shocked when I saw happily running 5.0 on their server w/o anything related to my 5.1 installation…

After some short investigation I’ve found out, that it was cpanel (dumb software for dumb system administrators) – it noticed, that installed mysql version (5.1) is not the same as it thought it should be (5.0), so without any warnings or notices it removed all 5.1 rpms and installed “brand new” 5.0.

Here I’d like to say GREAT THANKS to mysql team for such a great software which did not screwed up user’s data in such situation. But what idiots in cpanel development team decided, that is it appropriate and acceptable to perform such operations?! As an administrator and as a software developer I do not understand them – I just can’t understand such approach….

So, enough complaining – here is a piece of useful information for my readers: If you’re so unlucky to have cpanel installed on your server and you’d like to upgrade your mysql manually, then you can perform following operations:

After these small changes your cpanel will forget about mysql upgrades and you’ll be able to do what you want and not what some dumb developers decided you should do.

It’s been a long time since we’ve started this project and it is time to make a checkpoint. So, I’ve decided to release final 1.0 version and make 1.X branch stable while all serious development with deep architectural changes will be done 2.X branch (trunk at this moment).

Changes from previous release:

• Perl semaphores implementation caused huge memory leaks (mmmd_mod).
• Now we do not send any commands to hard offline hosts with dead TCP/IP stack to prevent mointoring problems for other hosts.
• Removed legacy StartSlave method from agent code which caused problems on some Perl versions
• Added a few fixes to prevent non-exclusive roles from moving. This caused internal status structures to be corrupted.
• Made all mysql checks properly report errors occurring (previously they were resulting in an OK response). Thanks to Phillip Pearson.
• Some memory leaks found in mysql checkers and as a quick fix we’ve added an idea of “Maximum Checks Before Restart” to all checkers. If you want some checker to restart after N checks, simply add “restart after N” to your checker declaration.
• Added some more docs to the project site.

New version can be obtained here or from the project’s SVN repository.

Recently I had one customer for consulting and aside from mysql optimization, etc they asked me for cacti installation/setup to monitor their pretty generic LAMP application. I’ve started setting up all this stuff and I’ve never thought it could be so painful… lots of different templates for the same tasks, all of them are incompatible with recent cacti releases, etc, etc… So, this post is generally a list of used templates with a fixes I’ve made to make them work on recent cacti release.

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Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.

So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.

P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.