world gone mad

Setting Up Master-Master Replication On Four Nodes With MySQL 5 On Debian Etch

This tutorial explains how you can set up MySQL master-master replication on four MySQL nodes (running on Debian Etch). The difference to a two node master-master replication is that if you have more than two nodes, the replication goes in a circle, i.e., with four nodes, the replication goes from node1 to node2, from node2 to node3, from node3 to node4, and from node4 to node1.

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion....

Red Hat’s chairman wins enterprising award. Sun updates StarOffice. Barracuda Networks acquires 3SP. Reaction to Sun’s reorganization. Barack Obama’s laptop. And more.

Press releases
Red Hat, Inc.’s Matthew Szulik Named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2008 Overall National Winner Ernst & Young

Ingres Launches Ingres Database 9.2 Ingres

Sun Microsystems Unveils StarOffice 9 Software Sun Microsystems

Red Hat Increases Authorization to Repurchase Common Stock Red Hat

Barracuda Networks Launches Barracuda SSL VPN Following Acquisition of Reputable SSL VPN Provider Barracuda Networks

Red Hat Delivers Dramatic Cost Savings and Performance to World’s Most Demanding Mission-Critical Platforms Red Hat

Univa UD Launches UniCluster 4.1 and Family of HPC Management Products Univa UD

Community Created GroundWork Monitor Japanese Generally Released To Address Growing Market Demand GroundWork Open Source

Open Kernel Labs Expands Global Market Presence: Launches European HQ Open Kernel Labs

Engine Yard Introduces Developer Support for Merb Engine Yard

Day Software Announces General Availability Of CQ5.1 Day Software

REvolution Computing Integrates Their R Distribution into Microsoft’s New High Performance Computing Server REvolution Computing

Yoggie Opens up its Miniature Hardware Firewall Yoggie Security Systems

Adobe Advances Flash Platform at MAX 2008 Adobe

ERP5 World Forum Defines Road Map for the Future Nexedi

News articles
Norway encourages use of open source software Associated Press

Sun’s Rich Green Set Open Source In Motion; Lift-off Still To Come Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

(InformationWeek evidently had something of an open source special this week.covering topics such as virtualization, SOA, content management, Linux, network management, business intelligence, Enamoly, and enterprise usage in general.)

The Microsoft-Novell Linux deal: Two years later Paul Krill, InfoWorld

Business vs. FOSS: Six Pressure Points Bruce Byfield, Datamation

Rule #2: Create a community Terry Hancock, Free Software Magazine

Open source growth dims LAMP stack to symbolic status Pam Deringer, SearchEnterpriseLinux

Bug Labs creates open source Lego for software engineers Bruce Byfield, Linux.com

Blogs
What if Sun fails with open source? Dave Rosenberg, Cnet

Rumors of the Demise of Open Source Startups: Greatly Exaggerated Mark Radcliffe, Law & Life: Silicon Valley

Open Source and Sustainability, Updated Michael Tiemann, Open Source Initiative

Sun: Dead company walking? Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ComputerWorld

ZipTie: New features, new name, new license? Tristan Rhodes, The Open Source Advocate

It’s the Infrastructure, Stupid John Mark Walker, There is No Open Source Community

Shouldn?t Obama use Linux, and not a Mac? Amanda McPherson, The Linux Foundation

Announcing Tungsten Replicator Beta for MySQL Robert Hodges, Continuent

French Recording Industry Sues SourceForge For Hosting Open Source P2P Mike Masnick, Techdirt

Meet the IT Channel?s Top 50 Open Source Companies The VAR Guy

http://blogs.sun.com/netbeansphp/entry/sftp_support_added

Sheeri has already commented on this, but I want to stress that MySQL 5.1.30 will be GA by December 6th, 2008.

• Support new databases easily
• Filter and transform SQL events flexibly
  
• Replicate between databases and applications, messaging systems, or files that you don't traditionally combine with replication
  

• Extractors remove data from a source, usually a database.
• Appliers put the events in a target, usually a database.
  
• Filters transform or drop events after extraction or before application.
  

The Cloud Computing Expo at Fairmont Hotel in san Jose, CA is fast approaching and I plan to be there to learn and meet the folks interested in Cloud Computing. If you plan to be there, dont miss the hands on Cloud Computing BootCamp, also being held at Fairmont hotel on 20th Nov. and is Free.

Led by Williamson, the Cloud Computing Bootcamp will illustrate all the major players and provide a hands-on program with configuration samples, live demos and working setups you can further adapt and play with.

Hope to see you there and chat about how you can leverage the Sun Cloud offerings to build applications for the cloud or build your own clouds.

Matt Reid wants to know what we want in an Open Source MySQL monitoring solution ?

He is working on the second incarnation of Monolith and wants input from the MySQL community.

Now for me the bigger question is if we want an isolated tool that runs stand alone, or a tool which we can integrate it in something we already have.

To me there is a difference between a tool that I want to use to debug my environment, such as Mytop or MySQL Activity Report, in that case I need some tool that quickly installs with little dependencies and little impact.

On the other side I want a tool that is constantly there, that tells me about trends and performance history. But there I don't want an isolated toool, I want something fully integrated where I can correlate different measurements from disk io, memory usage etc , that tool should also tell me about the things that go
wrong.

We did some research earlier this year to figure out the current state of Open Source monitoring tools. Different tools have a different audience.. some go for the network layer, others take the os level and other even try to go deep inside the applications.

Given that knowledge we even had the idea to refocus that research comparing different monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Zenoss, Hyperic and Nagios again but this time with a focus on monitoring MySQL and submit that as an abstract for the upcoming MySQL conference, we didn't .. maybe next time.

There's plenty of frameworks already that will allow you to send alerts on all of the occasions you list, or allow you to graph all the values you want. And yes we want to see those values too.

But do we want yet another tool , yet another URL to browse to or do we want those alerts and graphs integrated in an existing tool such as Zabbix, Zenoss or
Hyperic .. I guess I prefer the integrated approach.

On a daily basis, I work with Sun's ISV partners and open source communities to help them adopt Sun technology and make sure that their software works best on Sun.  One of the areas that I have been focusing on lately is MySQL.  Many of the ISVs / open source communities that I have been talking to recently are either just starting to look at MySQL (due to customer demand) or are trying to make their relationship with MySQL more formal.  Something that seems to be of interest to them is the  MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance Program (MECA).  MECA is MySQL's partner program, which is geared toward supporting businesses that sell, service, and support and/or build solutions on MySQL Enterprise, or provide solutions based on MySQL database technologies.  There are different membership levels, but the base level, called MySQL Enterprise Ready Partner, is free of charge, and provides access to software (for developmental purposes) as well as the knowledge base.  Additionally, it includes a listing in the MySQL Partner site.  If you think you qualify, register now.

I was able to attend OpenSQLCamp 2008, even while under the influence of DayQuil, jetlag (spent the week in Santa Clara), 3 hours of sleep and a 2 hour drive. Then there’s folks like Arjen who flew across 15 times zones and was still coherent - I guess I’m just not cut out for lots of travel in short time spans. Oh well.

The un-conference was great. You didn’t have the distractions of vendors with big obnoxious displays promising the sun/stars/moon, sales droids trying to peddle wares, marketing puppets who still think vendor lockin is a great strategy - just some really smart folks getting together, sharing what they’ve learned and collaborating. People from MySQL, Drizzle, Postgres and SQLite were there.

Brian Aker’s keynote was insightful. I liked the sticker on his laptop: “My other computer is a data center.” Vadim’s session on the Percona patchset helped illustrate what patches they include in MySQL and why. A particularly good side-conversation in the session was Brian highlighting a need for someone to pick up management of the InnoDB code. Since InnoDB is developed behind closed doors, someone can step up and put up a mailing list so the community can coordinate 3rd party patches into a single, cohesive code base. provide for a community-driven time-line of features, fixes, etc. The Oracle/InnoBase developers would be most welcome however their lack of communication in the past has necessitated this.

Arjen’s OurDelta session explained what the OurDelta project is about and how it works behind the covers. For me, this highlighted, in my mind, how MySQL is becoming fractioned due, in part, it MySQL’s/Sun’s development strategy. With such long time lines between releases, many patches containing fixes and features are put out there by the community and different people are bundling the patches and releasing new versions. OurDelta and Percona are the prime examples. They don’t always include the same patches in their releases. In all honesty, calling OurDelta or Percona’s distributions “MySQL” is misleading and leads to confusion. They are derivitive works based on MySQL’s code - forks.

Jay Pipe’s Join-Fu talk was entertaining. Besdies learning what really annoys Jay (the phrase “chaps my ass” was used a lot,) I learned a bit about the internals of MySQL that I can directly apply. I did not know that stored procedures were compiled and cached on a per-connection basis, not across all connections. This can have serious performance implications.

Dr. Richard Hipp’s talk on How SQL Database Engines Work was good. It revealed the good and bad of retrieving data from indexes and data tables. After the talk, one is almost left wondering how in the world databases work at all given the how extremely complex data retrieval can get. Yay smart people!

Peter Zaitsev filled in for Piotr Biel for the Sphinx talk. I had heard Patrick Galbraith discuss Sphinx during a MySQL Webinar on memcached UDFs a few weeks ago so I was just refreshing what I had already learned.

Kelly McDonald presented their work on developing a complete auditing system in Postgres for all database activity (or activity on the tables they were interested in.) Auditing systems can be annoying to develop so it was good to see how they did it. With a little C code and some triggers, they were able to identify all data changes down to the end user submitting the changes, including the web session - all vital for debugging problems in today’s complex web applications.

Finally, I sat in on the Lightning talks. Giuseppe Maxia gave a demonstration of the MySQL Sandbox. I’d heard about it but was impressed with the simplicity it affords. Ronald Bradford put out feelers for MySQL monitoring (what people use, what people should use, what should get monitored, etc.) Baron showed how to create snapshots using LVM for purposes of backing up MySQL. There were others but my head was quite fuzzy and sleepy with the onset of the Food Coma from lunch.

Hackathon. Sadly, I was feeling too crappy to drive back to Charlottesville to attend the hackathon on Sunday.

Thanks to Baron for dreaming this up and actually setting the wheels in motion. If you missed it, you missed out.

Today is an exciting day for us. We have announced that with the upcoming DRBD 8.3 release (currently scheduled for the end of this year), all those features that are currently commercially licensed in our DRBD+ add on will be merged into the GPL DRBD main source tree. That means that stacked device support, huge device support (larger than 4TB per device), and checksum-based resync are all coming to DRBD.

Is this something that we haven’t done before? No it’s not. We have, in the past, repeatedly merged DRBD+ features into DRBD. We have not, however, done so previously on this scale. That is new.

How will this affect our customers and users?

• First of all, if there ever was any relevant functionality gap between proprietary storage replication solutions and DRBD (there wasn’t — we had DRBD+ for that), not even a trace of any such gap will soon be left in DRBD as a fully open source, GPL-licensed solution.
• Secondly, for those would-be customers that previously had to back away from DRBD+ because it was not open source, and instead had to rely on open source drivers for proprietary hardware, that concern is now gone.
• And thirdly, it makes for much easier integration of DRBD into certified, fully open source high availability source software stacks, even for huge storage sizes. Whether that stack is maintained exclusively by us, by a partner, or by both jointly.

Has this been an easy decision? No, it took some contemplation. But we’re absolutely confident that it’s the right step in the right direction. So do watch our DRBD community web site for announcements regarding the 8.3 pre-release cycle and release.

The Diameter protocol is designed to provide an Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) framework for applications. The Diameter base protocol is defined by RFC 3588. The 3GPP standards body has adopted Diameter as the primary signaling protocol for AAA and mobility management in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

In an IMS architecture, an application server like SailFin will use Diameter to communicate with HSS (Home Subscriber Server). HSS is a central subscriber database that performs AAA and helps in locating the user.

Traffix systems announced that it will officially join the GlassFish Partner Program and Traffix?s OpenBloX(TM) Diameter will become a preferred Diameter platform for Project SailFin. OpenBloX Diameter integration with SailFin will be facilitated by a J2EE Connector 1.5 resource adapter and a Diameter java library.

MS6 of SailFin is available for download. Please download and give it a try. And previous entries on Sailfin at TheAquarium are here.