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If you're like me, you love the granular permissions capabilities of MySQL but hate the work that goes into managing them.

Recently, I've been dealing with MySQL permissions a lot and most of the time I'm creating very similar permissions over and over again. It got me thinking that I could really use MySQL groups. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything like groups in MySQL and according to plans won't be added officially until MySQL 7.0 (WL#988). Considering they originally planned to include Role support in MySQL 5.0, I'm not sure I'm holding my breath.

While searching around, I found Securich – a project about 6 months old which uses stored procedures to create a much more capable and easy to manage permissions system on top of MySQL's existing permissions. DISCLAIMER: I have not actually tried this so everything I say is based on what I'veunderstood from the documentation.

February 14, 2010 Tips

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

January 28, 2010 thoughts

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups. EMC provides two main tools for managing snapshots in this type of situation:

• EMC Replication Manager
• EMC PowerSnap Networker Module

The PowerSnap Module supposedly automates taking snapshots for the purpose of backups, while Replication Manager supposedly provides a much more robust package.

With Replication Manager you might create a policy to take a snapshot every five minutes, keep the last 10, and use those for backups whenever necessary.

To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won't change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically EMC has no server-less backup offerings for Solaris with ZFS.

January 18, 2010 rant

I've been paying a lot of attention to this site since I switched platforms and somehow people are finding some fairly irrelevant content on my site for the search terms making path persistent in solaris 10 so I figured I better put some real answers up.

December 07, 2009 tutorial

While setting up some developers with remote SmartSVN via X over SSH using Plink, I ran into the following error:

Xlib: PuTTY X11 proxy: wrong authentication protocol attempted

SmartSVN couldn't connect to the tunneled X server display. I was extremely confused since I'd been using X tunneling successfully with SecureCRT. After googling the error message a little bit, it seems that the part about the "wrong authentication protocol attempted" is misleading.

November 24, 2009 troubleshooting