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Technology

MySQL Upgrade Gotcha

November 6, 2008 by 0 Comments

I was trialling a MySQL database upgrade today (from 5.0 to 5.1) and hit a nasty little gotcha that I feel warrants a mention (mostly to myself). In its simplest form, the upgrade process is very straightforward and involves simply loading data dumped from MySQL 5.0 into a 5.1 database (using a regular mysql command), followed by a once-off execution of the mysql_upgrade command (to bring the various tables and grants up to date):

$ mysql -u root -p testdb < dumped50.sql
$ mysql_upgrade -u root -p testdb

However, when I tried the latter command, I received this error:

Looking for 'mysql' in: mysql
FATAL ERROR: Can't find 'mysql'

I did fine a simple solution here which was to first change to the directory containing the mysql_upgrade program itself and execute it from there:

$ cd /opt/coolstack/mysql/bin
$ ./mysql_upgrade -u root -p testdb

As I said, its a simple solution and I do tend to follow this general rule most of the time but nevertheless, the error generated when you don’t do this is far for informative.

Technology

Trial migration from Coolstack 1.2 to 1.3.1

October 1, 2008 by 2 Comments

I got an opportunity to run a trial migration of several applications from Solaris Coolstack version 1.2 to version 1.3.1 recently. The Coolstack applications that we use include MySQL, Apache (including mod_jk), Tomcat and Memcached.

I had no problems at all with the Tomcat or Memcached upgrades but did hit 2 minor issues with MySQL and Apache (mod_jk actually).

1. MySQL

This involved going from MySQL 5.0.45 to 5.1.25 and whilst I found that a regular mysqldump of my MySQL 5.0 databases imported without error into MySQL 5.1, I did encounter some minor issues with user permissions later on. Fortunately, the guide to Upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 proved very useful and revealed that I had missed an essential step in the upgrade process which was the use of the mysql_upgrade utility. There is lots more to read about in the upgrade guide and depending on your configuration, there may be more steps to be considered.

2. Apache (mod_jk)

Whilst the Apache upgrade (2.2.6 to 2.2.9) worked a treat, I found that mod_jk 1.2.26 employs stricter rules in relation to the placement of JkMount/JkMountFile commands in VirtualHosts. In my previous configuration, I had a single JkMount command inside my mod_jk.conf file (which in turn was included from the main httpd.conf file). However, using this configuration with Apache 2.2.9 and mod_jk 1.2.26, I found that my AJP load balancer was not working correctly for one of my VirtualHosts. It was only when I moved my JkMount command inside the scope of the VirtualHost that it started working again.

Other Comments

Most of the SMF service names in the Coolstack 1.3.1 applications have been renamed slightly. In Coolstack 1.2, all of the SMF service names began with csk- but now they all end with -csk instead. This was apparently done to make the service names more compatible with OpenSolaris but, to be honest, I find it a little bit annoying as we’ve written a number of useful scripts that manage these services explicitly by name.

Coolstack 1.3.1 includes two different versions of Tomcat (5.0 and 6.0) which install to different locations and have different SMF service names.

Technology

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 completed

June 23, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve just upgraded this blog to use WordPress 2.5.1 and thankfully it was a pretty painless process. Whilst there should be very few obvious changes to most readers, there are quite a number of changes to the WordPress dashboard, mostly attempts to make it easier for me to manage the blog.

It will probably take a couple of days to get used to the new interface but I’ve already seen a number of things I do like and some others that I don’t. I like the improvements in the general menu system as it’s now a lot easier to find things.

However, they seem to have overdone it on the rearrangments they’ve made to some of the other screens. For instance, when posting a new article, the categories used to be neatly displayed down the right-hand side of the screen but now they are much lower down and I have to scroll down to configure them. Not only that but the categories themselves are now displayed in a fixed size scrollable area so I also have to scroll down within this area to find some of the categories. This is a real pain, especially as I have a decent sized widescreen monitor with plenty of screen realestate.