The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.1

This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 11.1 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of OpenSUSE 11.1, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol …

While we're on the topic of Bazaar - this week I got informed by the organizers of the FrOSCon 2008 conference that they accepted two of my talk proposals: one session will be an introduction to this source code management system (what a coincidence), the other one will be an introduction to OpenSolaris for Linux users, explaining some of the underlying technologies and how they differ from what a seasoned Linux user may be accustomed to.

And no, I have not given up on using Linux - quite the contrary! I have been very impressed by the latest OpenSUSE 11.0 release and already run it for since quite some time on several of my work systems. In fact, I already convinced several colleagues of mine to …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning …

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

sysbench - Linux test bench. Easy as pie to test CPU, memory, threads, mysql, and disk performance.

Full description is available here: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/docs/

install mysql, mysql-devel
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sysbench/sysbench-0.4.8.tar.gz
tar xvzf sysbench*gz
cd sysbench*
./configure && make install

mysql tests

This will run 10 separate consecutive mysql tests using an InnoDB table type, each with 100 mysql threads, doing a total of 1000 various SQL operations per test. Then it will print the total time they took to finish:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test \\
  --mysql-host='HOST' --mysql-table-engine=innodb prepare
 
time perl -e "foreach(1..10){print \`sysbench --max-requests=1000 --test=oltp \\
  --mysql-user=USER …