Geert JM Vanderkelen

An old couple barely managed to get off the train. She helps herself forward with two extra legs; her husband strolls a bit behind. Suddenly he picks up the pace, reaching for I thought was her hand. No, her coat was not hanging right, and it toke lots of his energy to put it right.
She didn't notice, he puffed a breath and I cracked a smile.

Sometimes it's good when a train got cancelled. I was forced to take the slower IC from Frankfurt to Essen, but right now I am enjoying watching the river Rhein carrying goods and people. It's also a beautiful, sunny day so the castles and old towns are looking nice.
Still a couple hours to go and I am runny out of coffee money.. In Koblenz just now..

I am a bit dwelling in the wonderful world of Microsoft Windows. And if you know me, you'd say: "WTF?!?". Anyway, checking out some trick (which I'll blog later) I tried a simple GRANT to see if the grant-tables were OK.

mysql> GRANT SELECT ON foo.* TO 'geert'@'localhost';
ERROR 1133 (42000): Can't find any matching row in the user table

Now that's cryptic, isn't it? Reason: SQL Modes!

sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"

The problem, or rather, the cool thing is the NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER. This prevents creating users without a password.

MySQL Cluster supports online backups using the ndb_mgm client tool with the START BACKUP statement. If you omit the ID, it will take automatically the next value.
Problem is that when you do a system restart, this ID is reset to 1. If you didn't move your backups from your data nodes to another machine (which is of course something you should do), you might get errors.
A rather easy trick is to provide a timestamp as ID, for example using Unix time.

 shell> ID=`date +%s` && ndb_mgm "START BACKUP $ID"

Now your the directories on the data nodes containing the backups will have a time in them, and it will survive system restarts. You can of use of course use any integer as ID: 2^32 as of MySQL 6.3.23 (earlier only 2^31 is supported).

20 years ago I played with our Atari and Ninento NES consoles. Mario Bros., the first Zelda games, space invader-clones, .. they all timed out. Few years later I got introduced too BBS. Finally, after writing my first email using elm and pico, I mounted the Internet at the VUB (university).
Today, after 12 years continuously online, I work for MySQL/Sun Microsystems, and I'm bored with the Internet. It's as common as a telephone, as useful as a dictionary and sometimes as pretty as dog poop.
Well, it's still useful, like a bottle opener.. It seems that the only thing that keeps it alive is the flow of new buzzwords for old stuff.

Using MySQL 5.1 you can log to tables when --log-output=TABLE is set. Both tables, mysql.general_log and mysql.slow_log, are created using the CSV engine. Problem here is that when you use mysqlhotcopy to backup the mysql database, you will get an error message saying the tables can't be locked.

shell> mysqlhotcopy mysql
DBD::mysql::db do failed: You can't use locks with log tables.
 at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 452.

Solution or workaround, use a regular expression to ignore all tables which end with the string '_log':

shell> mysqlhotcopy mysql./~.+_log$/

But that's not the end of it. We found this to be actually a bug, but not a biggy really. I opend a bug report and also proposed a fix. Basically, we would ignore certain tables which mysqldump is also ignoring.
I actually did Perl today! OH MY!!1

I've been pulling my (few) hairs out on this one, but when DHCP fails to work on some networks, it could mean you didn't allow configd to accept incoming connections. When you connect to a new network, at start up, MacOS (at least in MacOS 10.5/Leopard) will ask you to allow or disallow incoming connections to configd. Allow it, otherwise it will not work!
Well, that's what I think.. The only solution I have right now is to disable the firewall.. If anyone can tell me how to add configd to the firwall, would be great!