Tips

Better User Management for MySQL

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.

Caveats on Using Snapshots for Server-less Backups

Whether you are dealing with disk I/O in reading the data from the disks, or CPU for compressing or encrypting the data (or both- remember to compress and then encrypt!), or network for transferring the data to a backup server, the added load of a backup on your production servers is unwelcome. For this reason, the period of time during which backups can be made, aka. backup window, may be limited- even severely.

You may say, "It only takes me X hours to do a full backup of everything", but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever you can to take the backup off the production hardware altogether.

Storage Snapshots are one method for taking the production servers out of the backup equation. By creating a consistent, point in time snapshot on your storage, and mounting it on your backup server, you can backup your data using your backup server's resources while your production servers continue as usual.

Caveats of this method in general are:

EMC Replication Manager in Solaris

UPDATE: No ZFS Support for Replication Manager in the near future

Using storage level snapshots can be used to run backups without directly requiring resources from the original host.

EMC Replication Manager coordinates the creation of application consistent snapshots across all the hosts in your network. It handles scheduling creation/expiration of snapshots,  mounting and unmounting from backup servers, etc. from a single console.

Although it is not tightly integrated into EMC Networker like the similar Networker PowerSnap module, it can be used to start a backup process after taking a new snapshot and it has the capability to manage snapshots unrelated to backups from a GUI.

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

Import Old Blogger Content into WordPress

Recently I've been migrating my old Blogger content to WordPress. I've been considering this ever since Blogger announced it's new layout / format which required hosting the blog on their servers. Finally I found the energy to tackle the beast but quickly hit my first obstacle- how to import the old Blogger posts.

If you haven't already, you must be using New Blogger and a Google Account on Blogger. If you are still using Old Blogger, the importer will not work. - http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

Importing from my old Atom or RSS feeds didn't work.

Importing from a Blogger export file didn't work either.

Finally I found a solution which worked for the most part.