Lenz Grimmer's blog

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been visually enhanced by including a time stamp and the message category (e.g. Info, Warning or Error). In addition to that, it is now possible to log messages to a local or remote syslog server. This feature requires the Sys::Syslog Perl module.
• The man page has now been converted into an asciidoc file, which makes it easier to generate other document formats as well, e.g. a HTML version.
• Several small bugs have been fixed, too: see the ChangeLog for details.

If you are looking for a convenient backup tool to create fast and consistent MySQL backups, please give mylvmbackup a try! You feedback is appreciated. A tarball and RPM are now available for download from the project's home page. Thanks!

While browsing the fabolous ThinkWiki pages I stumbled over this little gem: the lt_hotswap kernel module finally allows me to eject the CD-ROM drive in my Thinkpad T42's UltraBay without having to shut down Linux first. This module makes sure that the device is properly unregistered from the kernel's device list. Now I can replace it with e.g. a second battery on the fly and don't have to shutdown the OS completely! The installation on my SUSE Linux 10.1 system was quite easy: after downloading the source tarball from the SourceForge.net download page I performed the following commands:

tar zxvf lt_hotswap-0.3.6.tar.gz
cd lt_hotswap-0.3.6
make
sudo make install
sudo rcacpid restart
modprobe lt_hotswap

You need to have the kernel-source package installed, as well as the gcc compiler, of course. Now when I eject the little lever that allows me to pull out the CD-ROM drive from the UltraBay, the following message appears in /var/log/messages:

lt_hotswap: Requesting IDE eject!
lt_hotswap: Attempting to eject

Now the CD-ROM drive can be safely pulled from the UltraBay and e.g. exchanged with an additional battery. Inserting the battery yields the following kernel message:

kernel: ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)

The battery info also appears in /proc/acpi/battery and is fully operational. Unfortunately battery monitoring tools like KPowersave or gkrellm don't display the second battery, but at least the kernel is happily using it. I can remove the battery again, but this event does not seem to get registered properly - the second battery remains visible in /proc/acpi/battery, but shows zero capacity and the "present" state does not change. But at least replacing the CD-ROM drive with the battery now workes fine, which was my major concern. And it is still possible to re-insert the CD-ROM drive again:

kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1868-0x186f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
kernel: Probing IDE interface ide1...
kernel: hdc: HL-DT-STCD-RW/DVD DRIVE GCC-4242N, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
kernel: hdc: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

If you want to enable the lt_hotswap module at bootup, you need to add its name to the MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT variable in the /etc/sysconfig/kernel configuration file.

If your Laptop uses an external docking station to host a CD-ROM drive, there are some good news for you: according to Andreas Jaeger's blog, the upcoming openSUSE 10.2 will actually provide a generic Dockutils framework that will support docking/undocking functionality for different laptops and vendors. It will be interesting to find out if this covers UltraBay devices as well.

I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.

After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.

Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code cleanups. His changes motivated me to make a few more modifications and improvements by myself, which have now been rolled into a new release.

The new options provide some more flexibility in the way the script handles the logical volumes and how the backup files are being created. I also overhauled the building and packaging and added a Makefile to automate these procedures. For details, please refer to the ChangeLog and check the manual page and the README for additional info.

A tarball and RPM of version 0.2 can now be downloaded from the project page.

The SVN repository can now be browsed using WebSVN as well.

Please give it a try! Your feedback is very welcome.

If you happen to live close to Hamburg, Germany, and you are keen on learning more about High Availability Solutions on Linux, you don't want to miss Lars Marowsky-Brée's talk about "Cluster and Data Center Automation with Linux HA". It will be held this Thursday at 19:00 at the SAGE@GUUG Hamburg Meeting. If you want to participate, please RSVP via OpenBC. See you there!

Yesterday we had our fourth MySQL User Group Meeting here in Hamburg. We had 19 attendees and a very informative talk about Ruby on Rails/Active record, held by Stefan Saasen. Thanks a lot, Stefan! It was quite insightful and we had good discussions and excellent food afterwards. I look forward to our next meeting, which I have already scheduled for February, 5th! So save the date and RSVP!

Some pictures of our meeting are in my Gallery, a PDF of Stefan's talk can be obtained from here. Enjoy and see you next time!

Just a quick reminder: the Hamburg MySQL User Group meets tonight at 7pm at the usual place. See the invitations on Meetup.com or OpenBC/Xing for details - around 25 people have signed up so far, so we should have a great time. Stefan Saasen will give a talk about Ruby on Rails/Active Record. See you there!

If you happen to live somewhere around Delhi, India and you are curious to learn more about MySQL Cluster, make sure to RSVP for Kai's Workshop on this subject, which will take place on Friday, November 17, 2006, 6:00 PM at Value One, D 21 NDSE 1, Delhi. Space is limited, so hurry!

I personally will also mention MySQL Cluster during my talk about High Availability Solutions with MySQL that I will give at the Fachhochschule Oldenburg/Ostfriesland/Wilhelmshaven tomorrow.

It is really noticable that the summer is over now. While it was quite silent during the past few months, the last quarter of the year will be packed with conferences and events again.

And we will contribute our share to it, too: in addition to sending speakers to various upcoming events, MySQL will also host two European MySQL User conferences next week. The MySQL Northern Europe Customer Conference will take place in London (UK), on Tuesday, October 17th 2006. Two days later, the MySQL Central Europe Customer Conference will be held in Munich (Germany) on Thursday, October 19th 2006. Both are one-day events, with two tracks of talks in parallel. The sessions will be held by both MySQL employees as well as customers, talking about their experiences in using MySQL in their environments.

I attended a similar event in Warsaw, Poland two weeks ago, where I spoke about MySQL, Open Source and Community in front of an audience of about 350 people. The organizers actually had to close the registration four weeks before the event, as they could not arranger a larger room on short notice. A few pictures of the confererence can be found in my Gallery. I was very impressed by the audience and the interest about OSS and MySQL in particular. We received a lot of good comments and had nice discussions with the attendees.

On Thursday this week (the 12th), I will be speaking at the Linux Business Day in Luebeck, Germany. It will be a general session about MySQL (both the company and the product) as well as the benefits of Open Source Software in general and MySQL in particular.

Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I’d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all – we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated.

We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely – this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a different name. The problem appeared resolved as the project was renamed to SQLFront and the old web site pointed to the new location – we regret that the developers decided to shut down the entire project shortly afterwards.

We encourage and support every application that broadens the MySQL Ecosystem. Why would we want to completely shut off applications that support us?

Just to remind you: tonight at 19:00 we'll meet at our usual place - please see me previous announcement for details. According to the RSVPs I received, we should be around 20 people. Paul McCullagh will talk about the PBXT Storage Engine, so this sounds like a fun evening. See you there!

Two days ago we added the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License to the list of licenses in the MySQL FLOSS license exception. In my opinion exception is actually a badly chosen word - extension would probably be more sufficient here as it actually extends the scope of the MySQL client libraries license. From the introductionary text on top of the document:

We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software ("FLOSS") applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries (the "Program") despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL").

In other words, the license exception allows the distribution of a derived work including the MySQL Client Libraries under a number of OSI-approved Open Source Licenses. This allows a broader range of (non-GPL) Open Source applications to link against the MySQL Client libraries. In essence, it makes the GPL less restrictive.

It's already a month old, but I just stumbled over this ITtoolbox Interview with Jonathan Cheyer (Open Source Community Manager) and Murat Demiroglu (Senior Product Manager) from Solid Information Technology, in which Dru Lavigne talks with them about Solid (the company) and the solidDB for MySQL storage engine, which is currently in beta testing. I still remember Solid from my times at SUSE Linux, where it used to be a part of the Linux distribution along with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas D and several other DBs...

While the MySQL Server source trees are maintained using the BitKeeper revision control system, several other MySQL projects (Connectors, GUI-Tools and the Manual) use Subversion instead.

To make it easier for external developers in getting familiar with the code base of the respective project, we now installed the FishEye SVN repository browser, which provides a very nice interface to the hosted repositories and boasts an impressive number of additional features like searching, diffing and RSS feeds.

This will hopefully encourage more developers to participate and contribute to these projects. FishEye will also make it more convenient for our own developers to work with their SVN repositories and should soon become a valuable tool for us.

JFYI: as discussed on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list today, I now moved my mercurial packages to the devel:tools:scm Project on the openSUSE build service now. Updated packages will be available from there instead of my home project.

Yes, I am an eyecandy and screensaver fan. I now added an RPM of the "Electric Sheep" screensaver to my RPM repository on the fabolous SUSE build service. Have fun!