Colin Charles Agenda

Peter posted that CentOS comes with a build of MySQL Enterprise. It should really be clarified that CentOS itself, comes with MySQL Community, as does Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On RHEL5/CentOS5, you’ll see:

mysql-5.0.22-2.2.el5_1.1
mysql-server-5.0.22-2.2.el5_1.1

The above are the default packages that CentOS provides. However, what Peter really is referring to is the CentOSPlus Repository, which by their own admittance is “not part of the upstream distribution and extend CentOS’s functionality at the expense of upstream compatibility. Enabling this repository makes CentOS different from upstream.”

The idea behind providing Enterprise builds, largely came from RHBZ#230412: No src.rpm available for mysql. Red Hat provides something called the Web Application Stacks product (RHWAS), in where they include MySQL Enterprise, amongst other software packages, and they charge for support (that differs from buying just a RHEL license). Max Spevack answers it pretty well, as this is the response he came to, after talking to folk at MySQL.

Its worth noting that CentOSPlus does not use Enterprise tarballs/SRPMS, but use sources from the BitKeeper tree. Its worth noting, that at the time of this writing, CentOSPlus does not include Enterprise RPMs for CentOS 5, just CentOS 4. Its also worth noting that patches are being applied, that are out of tree, to the RPMs. A snippet from the RPM changelog (rpm -q --changelog <packagename> if you must):

* Mon Dec 24 2007 Johnny Hughes <johnny@centos.org> 5.0.54-1.el4.centos
- upgraded to the 5.0.54 Enterprise BK tree. Removed patches that are
already incorporated into 5.0.54.

- added mysql-5.0.52-mysqldump-hang-33057.patch for mysql bug #33057

- added mysql-5.0.50-openssl-handshake-33050.patch fo mysql bug #33050

* Sun Dec 23 2007 Johnny Hughes <johnny@centos.org> 5.0.48-3.el4.centos
- modified the process of obtaining the Enterprise Sources to using bkf and
downloading directly from the MySQL Enterprise BitKeeper tree.

So, definitely interesting times. If you hit a bug, you might be wondering if its an upstream bug, or something that was provided by your packager. Of course, this is what is so great about the MySQL community – the ability to do just this! Currently, against 5.0.54, CentOSPlus is shipping 2 patches, with a few extra source packages that don’t come with regular tarballs. Will this number grow? Just remember, the “Enterprise” version you get in CentOSPlus is not “MySQL Enterprise”.

Technorati Tags: centos, mysql, distributions shipping mysql, patches

Khairil talks about server downtime, and I can attest to that (hogwarts is just above gambit). The Dell arrived on Friday, popped Centos 5.1 on it, realised that if you ticked “Virtualization”, you ended up not getting a regular kernel (no big deal, eh?). Configured it as best as could be configured, then headed out to the data center on Saturday morning. This after some fiasco of sleeping for under 4-hours, seeing that I was out on Friday night.

Removed the old box, installed the new one, everything came up, and life was dandy. Went over to C-ZONE in Low Yat to get my disk exchanged – it was one-to-one, seeing that it was within the first week. Very nice. Remotely configured the box with Zimbra again, and ZCS 5.0 is working fine. Its great to see that Zimbra figured out what the problem was with the RHEL4/CentOS4 installs of Zimbra. Fixed up the database, restored the websites, all remotely – I wonder if this kind of magic works in Windows land? I just love Unixes.

The Dell box is a 64-bit box, with full virtualization support. Question now is: how do I get more IPv4 IPs if the ISP only gives you one? While there’s some negotiation going on so I can get more, it’d be a shame if I had to create some Xen VMs to be IPv6 only.

Incidentally, if anyone wanted to see what a RAID failed device looks like, here’s some output:

[root@hogwarts ~]# mdadm -D /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Mon Jan 7 02:49:59 2008
Raid Level : raid1
Array Size : 485203072 (462.73 GiB 496.85 GB)
Device Size : 485203072 (462.73 GiB 496.85 GB)
Raid Devices : 2
Total Devices : 2
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Wed Jan 9 19:44:45 2008
State : clean, degraded
Active Devices : 1
Working Devices : 1
Failed Devices : 1
Spare Devices : 0

UUID : a502d8a1:724a68ab:cac9860f:943d44a5
Events : 0.22190

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 0 0 0 removed
1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1

2 8 3 - faulty spare /dev/sda3

[root@hogwarts ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda3[2](F)
485203072 blocks [2/1] [_U]

unused devices: <none>

Technorati Tags: raid, dell, centos, ipv4, xen, sysadmin

The great Interwebs have caused my tabs to expand, but here are a few bits I think a lot of you will find useful.
(Should’ve posted this about a week ago, but somehow, it never made it)

• Joel Spolsky’s Travel Survival Guide – Joel recently went on a tour to promote FogBugz, and he comes up with some sensible tips. His air travel tips might be a little too technical, but the fact that they fly first class alone, interests me greatly. As someone that spends a great amount of time in a tin can, in coach might I add, I can appreciate companies that place you in business or first class. Large companies like IBM and HP generally have policies of placing anyone flying longer than n hours in business class – open source companies haven’t quite got the hang of this yet.
• A month with FreeBSD, Zope and Plone – KageSenshi is a Fedora contributor, and currently works as an intern at Inigo Tech, the company started by my friend, Khairil. Main focus: Zope, Plone, and FreeBSD. The blog entry is interesting, because you can see that he enjoys interning for Inigo, is gladly willing to provide free publicity for Inigo, and it seems like he’s truly proud working for a startup. Thats a feeling a lot of employees in larger organisations don’t seem to have any longer – they just become corporate drones, IMHO. Here’s wishing Khairil and Inigo all the best in keeping the startup feeling alive and kicking.
• Why Comp Sci Grads Can’t Hack (and why you need them anyway…) – Its refreshing seeing this in words, from someone else, other than me. Reading this, and the article that spurred it: Is Computer Science Dying? > Computer Scientists Can’t Program! can be pretty useful. A 3-4 year bachelors teaches you an array of languages and concepts, that in the end, one becomes something of a “know it all”, yet not an expert in any domain. There is just no room for you to become an expert, because the curriculum just isn’t free-flowing. Writing a library management system over and over again, in a different language even, just makes no sense at all, does it? (I picked on a library management system because Ditesh, Prabu and I had a good laugh about this yesterday).
• CCPlus – This is Creative Commons at its best. I can do a By-Attribution-Non-Commercial, and also add a +Company Commercial License. This is what I’ve wanted for a few years. Now, when will Flickr implement this? In fact, sharing the original sizes for CC-licensed things on Flickr has always bugged me – I’m fine with everything but the original size (duh, I upload original JPGs). This will also be fancy for work, like training materials. I have a feeling I’ll be using this one very, very soon.