SysAdmin Valley

While working on some MySQL stuff today I came across some interesting projects.  About 2 years ago I attended the Boston MySQL Meetup group which had a guest speaker (Patrick Galbraith) and he spoke about setting up MySQL in a Multi-Master setup.  This is where you have two MySQL database servers and each one is a slave of the other.  Today I came across two projects that look promising, the first is Multi-Master Replication Manager for MySQL (or MMM) and the second is Flipper.

MMM is a set of scripts that perform monitoring/failover and management of MySQL master-master replication.  Flipper is also a set of tools that manage which server in a Multi-Master setup is writable and which is readable by moving IP addresses based on the server’s role.  Both look very promising and hopefully soon I’ll have some free time to play around with them.

I’ve started using Percona’s version of MySQL 5.1 and have run into a few issues trying to get other tools such as mytop or maatkit to install but have been having problems with RPM dependency’s.  I found the solution on this guy’s blog.  Basically, if you install the MySQL-client-percona, MySQL-percona, MySQL-server-percona, MySQL-shared-percona and Percona-XtraDB, instead of installing MySQL-shared-percona, you should download and force upgrade (rpm -Uvh –force packagename) the MySQL-shared-compat library directly from MySQL.  Just make sure you get the same version from MySQL that you’re using of the Percona MySQL.

Do you have multiple computers? Maybe one at work and one at home, or maybe you have two at work. Have you ever said I would love to have a way to keep my documents on multiple computers at the same time and not have to worry about copying the files back and forth. Or maybe you’re just looking for a simple way to backup your files in case of emergencies. Well, you should check out DropBox.

DropBox is a new way to manage your files. First you create an account one their website, then you install a piece of software on all your computers. Then when you add a file into your DropBox on one of your computers, immediately all your other computers download the new file. If you make a change to that document on any of the computers, all the others immediately pickup the change. No more copying your documents to CD/DVD/USB and then over to your other computer. Now all your documents are synchronized immediately.

Here’s another benefit.  If you have multiple computers that have different operating systems, this doesn’t matter.  You can automatically synchronize files between Windows, Mac and Linux too.

Another great feature of DropBox, have you ever accidentally deleted or changed a file and wished that you had a backup copy of it. Well now you do. Now you can recover deleted files or get back previous versions of your documents.

To get started, just go to DropBox and click Download DropBox.

Here’s some tools that are great for managing Amazon’s EC2 servers.

ElasticFox
ElastDream

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work with the Amazon Cloud and here are a few tools I’ve found useful for managing the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

S3Fox
Simple Access for S3 & AWS
Amazon S3 Filesystem for Windows
S3Sync for Ruby
S3cmd for Perl
S3fs for Linux

Edit:
CloudBerry Explorer for S3