Normally I like to use the OS’s package manager to manage the software on my system. This ensures that things are done consistently. When managing MySQL I’d also like to manage all my instances the same way. That makes life easier for me but also for my fellow DBAs and sysadmin colleagues.

I use CentOS and the rpm packages it provides and these work quite well. However, the MySQL rpms do not allow me to manage single and multiple instances alike and while mysqld runs as the mysql user the instance management needs to be done as root (stopping, starting instances, or default access). If you want to run multiple instances you can also use mysqld_multi, but that’s not the default setup.

So this is not ideal. While this may not be much of an issue if you manage a single server, if you manage tens or …

MySQL has an unusual grants system that allows a user to be specified by host, ip or network address. That is you identify a user as ’some_user’@'host.host.name’, ’some_user’@'1.2.3.4′ or ’some_user’@'10.3.%’.

That is quite a nice facility but using it is rather tricky. This potentially provides a lot more security as it allows you to specify that different types of database users can only perform certain actions from different types of hosts. So even if you know the user and password you may have trouble getting into a mysqld server. That’s good.

However, this flexibility comes at a price. There are no tools to help you manage this and I have often seen people resorting to using the simplest type of grant, for some_user@’%', or some_user@’10.%’.

I recently wrote a smalltemplate script which would allow me to …

Background Knowledge

For some reason or another the priority menu in the edit task panel is not wide enough and therefore it cuts off the priority names. This can be easily fixed by modifying some inline CSS. Yes I agree this should be done within the skin’s CSS file, however there is nothing present in the CSS file to alter that I could find.

Solution

Edit /taskfreak/include/html/xajax_panel_edit.php at line #18 by changing the width value of “40px” to “125px” or to what you desired width.

Code Before

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<td>< ?php
$objTemp = new ItemPriority();
$objTemp->qSelect('priority',($objTask->priority)?$objTask->priority:3,'','','style="width:40px"');
?></td>

Code After

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<td>< …

Background Knowledge

TaskFreak! presently does not have a means via the web interface to present a complete list of tasks for which the current user is the project leader. I will show you how to add “My Projects” list based on bpiper’s solution with a slight difference. My solution is almost identical to bpiper’s but with a different approach to continue support of the supported interface languages. To do this each supported language file will require to be edited.

Thanks to bpiper for posting your solution.

Solution

1. Edit /taskfreak/include/language/en/freak.php starting at line #15. Add in a new array key/value at any point you desire like so “‘my_projects’ => ‘My Projects’,” (without double quotes), see below for example.

   Note: Each interface language file will be …