Tech Blog » linux

Changing Mysql data directory require change to AppArmor

frank — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:44:43 +0000

After a bit of googling and hair-pulling, I realized that if I just changed the datadir directive in my.cnf will cause mysql start to fail on Ubuntu. The other thing is to add permissions to apparmor for mysql to access the new data directories.

Steps
1. sudo vi /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld
2. Add
/newdir/ r,
/newdir/** rwk,
3. sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart
4. sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

If that still does not work, check the nix permissions to be sure mysql is owner and group for the new directory recursively.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic slow Firefox

frank — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:54:38 +0000

There is a bug in the IPv6 lookup in Karmic that is making any application requesting IPv6 while a NAT is not configured to respond to IPv6 respond very slowly. It is still a bug not solved at this time. Buta solution for Firefox is given here as a work around for now.

VMware Server must be reconfigured when there is a kernel upgrade

frank — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:42:09 +0000

If the linux kernel is upgraded, vmware will not load http://localhost:8222. It requires a reconfigure when this happens. Do the following.

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

Forget your mysql root password?

frank — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:33:59 +0000

This following line saved my butt when something happened and my root password was no longer working.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.0

It will allow you to reset your root password without messing with the data or any other configuration in my.cnf.

Ubuntu apache2 virtualhost setup problems

frank — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:44:35 +0000

If you are getting error messages when starting apache2 like

“Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName”
or
“[warn] _default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 80, the first has precedence”

you need to make sure a couple of lines are in your /etc/apache2/httpd.confÂ file.

ServerName localhost
NameVirtualHost *:80

Ubuntu 9.04 Vmware Arrow Keys Problem

frank — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:45:53 +0000

I finally found how to get all those keys working on my newly installed Ubuntu 9.04 with my XP VM. The issue is that all the arrow keys and delete key don’t work. There are others too but not listed. So a bit of googling, I found that you have to map the keys in a vmware config file to solve the problem. So this is what needs to be done.

1. Edit /usr/lib/vmware/config
2. Add the following to the end.
xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu
3. Save it
4. Restart vmware

Thank goodness. What a pain this was to use with a whole bunch of keys not working.

GRUB Error 21 Dual Boot Raid

frank — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:54:17 +0000

I was installing Ubuntu to dual boot onto a newly added drive on my workstation that already has Windows XP. After the installation, GRUB gives me error 21. I looked through all the forums and help and tried everything from reinstalling GRUB to modifying menu.lst. Nothing worked. Then I figured out what the problem was. My system before adding the new drive had three drives; one with XP OS and two in a Raid 1 array for data. The issue was the Raid 1 array. With the new drive I added for Ubuntu, the computer had four drives. During installation, Ubuntu saw four drives and when installing GRUB, it pointed Ubuntu to boot on hd3,0. However, when GRUB tried to load, the BIOS was showing only three drives and hd3 was non-existent resulting in error 21.

Then I decided to move my SATA cables around so the location of the Ubuntu install does not change no matter if we saw the Raid 1 as one drive or two. So I kept XP on hd0, moved Ubuntu to hd1, and then having the Raid 1 drives to follow with hd2 and hd3. At this point, I reinstalled GRUB and tried to boot up again with the Raid 1 configured in the BIOS. Now I get GRUB error 17! What the heck is that? I found that if I got rid of Raid on the BIOS, error 17 goes away and GRUB comes up without a problem.

I got tired of trying to debug this and decided to just go all Ubuntu and just VM XP for the few things I still need to do on Windows.

Where to install Eclipse on Ubuntu

howie — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:21:27 +0000

If you’re like me, accustomed to installing most packages via Ubuntu’s package manager, you might be a bit confused as to where to install Eclipse since it should be in a place thats accessible by every user on your system.Â Sure you can install it in your user home directory but that wouldn’t be very tidy.

I extracted part of these instructions from: http://flurdy.com/docs/eclipse/install.html

These instructions assume you’ve downloaded and extracted the Eclipse tarball:

sudo mv eclipse /opt/eclipse cd /opt sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo mv eclipse /opt/eclipse cd /opt sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo chmod -R +r eclipse
sudo chmod +x `sudo find eclipse -type d`

Then create an eclipse executable in your path

sudo touch /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse

sudoedit /usr/bin/eclipse

With these contents:

#!/bin/sh
export ECLIPSE_HOME=”/opt/eclipse”
$ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

Now you can execute Eclipse from anywhere in your bash shell. Check out the original article for generating a desktop icon. In the tarball I downloaded, it didn’t come with the icon.xpm that contains the Eclipse icon but no worries for me.

The take-home lesson here is that /opt is meant as a place to install application software packages. The topic is Filesystem Heirarchy Standard (FHS) .. these folks seem to be the standard authority on it:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#OPTADDONAPPLICATIONSOFTWAREPACKAGES

However it’s not to say that this standard is the most progressive one we have today.Â I found GoboLinux to be particularly interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux#The_GoboLinux_hierarchy

Mysql on 32bit processor vs 64bit processor

frank — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:29:24 +0000

Here is the continuation of the experiment done previously on Mysql on Windows vs Linux. After doing more analysis and observation, it appeared that the difference in speed for the benchmark tests were not related to Windows and Linux but were related to the processor. The previous test just happened to have AMD 64s on the Linux machines and Intel Xeon 32bits on Windows. We hypothesized that the increased throughput of the 64bit processors resulted in about half the time required to return the same query run on a 32bit machine.

View the previous results

So we decided to test the same query again on a Windows machine with an AMD 64 X2. This time the result for the query took 7.35 second, almost the same as the other AMD 64s running Linux.

One more test to run the query on a Windows Intel 64bit chip machine would better solidify our hypothesis.

Mysql on Windows vs Linux

frank — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:12:56 +0000

I was working on optimizing a Mysql database today and accidentally stumbled upon a benchmarking exercise. The original Mysql database is hosted on a Windows Server 2003. I develop on a Mysql database server running on Ubuntu Linux. The Linux server ran the same query twice as fast as the Windows server without using caching or anything. I know that Linux does I/O caching on its own as well so I even tried running the query after a fresh reboot to rule out that factor. Then I got help from a colleague and started tweaking with the my.cnf/my.ini to make sure they were the same and each time, the results came back about the same. Mysql on Windows was consistently slower than Mysql on Linux.

Then we decided to load the database onto other servers for more data points on this Mysql performance test. We ran the same query returning 429 rows of data with 13 table joins and a couple of sub-queries. All queries were run on the command line client on the servers themselves to avoid network lag.Â All servers are running Mysql 5.0.x.

Results

1. Ubuntu Linux: 0.70 seconds
2. CentOS: 0.78 seconds
3. Windows 2003 Server: 1.40 seconds
4. Windows 2003 Server: 1.42 seconds

Server hardware

1. Ubuntu Linux
AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4200+
2GB DDR400
200GB 7200RPM SATA/150

2. CentOS
Dual Opteron 240
2GB DDR ECC
120GB 7200RPM SATA/300

3. Windows 2003 Server
Dual Xeon
2GB DDR ECC
7200RPM PATA

4. Windows 2003 Server
2 Dual Xeon (4 CPUs)
8GB DDR ECC
3 73GB 10,000RPM SCSI in RAID 5

A followup to the benchmark that clarifies the cause of the differences