Before I upgrade MySQL to the latest and greatest version, one of the first things that I do is export the user and grant information. In the past, I would keep all of my user information (user name, password, grants) in a text file, with the SQL for each user/grant ready to be executed on the upgraded server. I did use my own form of “mental encryption” for my passwords, so the passwords weren’t in plain English. But then I would have to decode my passwords each time before I executed the SQL statements.

When I upgrade, I usually like to dump all of the data and import it into the new version, so I have a fresh copy of the database. The MySQL server that I have is for my personal use and the data size is relatively small, so for my case it doesn’t take long to import the data.

But there were times when I would add a user in the MySQL database and forget to add it to my text file. Then, when it came time to upgrade and I …

MySQL MHA by Oracle ACE Director Yoshinori Matsunobu is an excellent open source tool to help in providing HA with native MySQL replication. The installation however is dependent on some Perl packages and to the untrained eye this may be an issue if you are using Percona Server as your choice of MySQL implementation.

The MHA Node page requires the perl-DBD-MySQL package to be installed. The installation on RedHat/CentOS/Oracle Linux look like this:

$ sudo yum install perl-DBD-MySQL
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.anl.gov
* extras: mirror.anl.gov
* updates: mirror.anl.gov
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check …

I was digging through some old project code and found this script. Sometimes one finds oneself in an odd situation and needs to convert regular SQL, say from a MySQL database dump, into SQLite3 format. There’s not too much else to say, but here is a script that helps with the process. It can likely be improved but this handles the items that came up during conversion on initial runs.

#!/bin/sh
####
# NAME: convert-mysql-to-sqlite3.sh
# AUTHOR: Matt Reid
# DATE: 2011-03-22
# LICENSE: BSD
####
if [ "x$1" == "x" ]; then
   echo "Usage: $0 "
   exit 
fi 
cat $1 |
grep -v ' KEY "' |   
grep -v ' UNIQUE KEY "' |
grep -v ' PRIMARY KEY ' |
sed '/^SET/d' |          
sed 's/ unsigned / /g' | 
sed 's/ auto_increment/ primary key autoincrement/g' |
sed 's/ smallint([0-9]*) / integer /g' | 
sed 's/ tinyint([0-9]*) / integer /g' |  
sed 's/ int([0-9]*) / integer /g' |      
sed 's/ character set [^ ]* / /g' |      
sed 's/ enum([^)]*) / varchar(255) /g' | 
sed 's/ on …

Using a lowercase hostname is typical but I got sloppy on a Windows 7 installation, after all Windows is case insensitive, and I used a mixed case hostname. It raised an interesting error when installing Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

Enterprise manager configuration failed due to the following error -

Failed to allocate port(s) in the specified range(s) for the following process(es): JMS
[5540-5559], RMI [5520-5539], Database Control [5500-5519], EM Agent [3938] | [1830-1849]

Refer to the log file at C:\app\McLaughlinM\cfgtoollogs\dbca\orcl\emConfig.log for more details.

You can retry configuring this database with Enterprise Manager later by manually running C:\app\McLaughlinM\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\bin\emca script.

After verifying the ports …

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {
                            'cvss:base_metrics' => { …

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

…

I've been involved in a number of interviews over the last few weeks as a client has been loking for a MySQL DBA. When you are looking for position as a DBA in a large scale environement there are some very important things you have to know.

You absolutely must know a scripting language. In a smaller environment this often isn't necessary. You will live and die by this in a large environment. I asked every applicant one specific question..if you had to change a mysql server variable on a pool of 100 mysql servers how would you do this? It's easy when it's one,two or even a dozen servers. just log in, change the my.cnf and change it "on the fly" if you can. Restart mysql if you can't.

You going to do that to 100 servers? It will take all day and be prone to failures. Scripting is the key here. Even just bash shell scripting can be very powerful. In another post I will cover a simple bash script to loop through a …

I’m in the process of getting the tests passing for the 0.03 release of NIST::NVD::Store::SQLite3 wherein our hero imports the CWE data and cross-indexes it with CVEs and CPEs.

Follow along and suggest some patches. I’m developing on Debian Wheezy, but I would very much like input from devs on other platforms.

http://git.colliertech.org/?p=NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3.git;a=summary

cjac@foxtrot:/tmp$ time git clone http://git.colliertech.org/git/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3.git
Cloning into 'NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3'...

real    0m32.757s
user    0m0.200s
sys     0m0.088s
cjac@foxtrot:/tmp$ ls NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3/t/data/
cwec_v2.1.xml  nvdcve-2.0-test.xml

Publish your patches and I’ll fetch them, or you can submit them in udiff format and I’ll review/apply. Thanks for playing along!

[edit 20120216T1456 -0800] …