If you have any stake in fire0, sorry for those bug.

In the midst of all that, I’ve got a mandate involving MySQL databases and the import of a big chunk of data (about 8gb raw). Yeah, I know, some peoples reading my blog will know whom I speaking of. The data come with the schema, the load data queries and the CSV files. Should be pretty easy, long, but easy.

Got that one wrong. I’ve been bitten by all the bugs that were on the road:
– MySQL LoadData (from CSV) use the TMPDIR variable (which was on root filesystem) and LoadData generate a temporary queries in that directory. In the present case, the 8GB raw csv represented over 40GB of required tmpdir space.
– MySQL Replication doesn’t live really well with importing large amount of data. The first (failed) import broke all the replication (ring of masters + slaves).
– and…

MySQL’s innodb log file cannot shrink its size. That’s pretty simple as a rule, but it creates lots of problems when you have a failed import due to free space issue. Whatever you do, MySQL will NOT give back this hard drive space unless you dump all and re-import. The current case being a database of over 20GB, it’s really a no-go (and since you are lacking free space, dump is a no-go).

The important things to take away from that encounter is: always enable innodb_file_per_table on MySQL. The performance overhead will be minimal (very) – you might even get better performance depending on your file system tolerance for fragmentation – AND – you will be able to drop table and regain the disk space… even if its only for a couple hours. The drop of a 10GB database should always give you some free space ;-). Question is: why haven’t MySQL put this setting as default ? Its been around for long enough… is stable and does help the general user (a sysadmin) experience.

– Les Laboratoires Phoenix welcomes a new managed client, at the same time as I got my two first contractual employee (with enough job to drive them for years).
– I’ll be giving a talk at ConFoo, March 12th, called ‘Massive Scalability’. Be there, its going to be a pretty good one.
– I’ve been mandated to write another article for the European edition of Linux+DVD. Deadline is in a couples days.
– I’ve started dancing classes. (No comments please ;-))
– With the wedding happening soon, we are totally swamped with stuff to do. From food tasting to getting whatever I will wear, going through hotel reservation, decoration choices… By themself, each task is quite easy to manage, but add to that the fact we are doing most of it remotely and that Catherine schedule is just crazy.

At least, this morning, I’ve got a 20 minutes break, waiting for the bus thats going to take me to Montreal – on yet another ‘business trip’.

But, beside everything that might be happening with my business (work log never been that full, started to get employees), I decided to take 2 minutes for a big fact of life (for sysadmin/management). Watch it, watch it: Nobody (especially YOU) care about backup. You care about successful restore. There! Now, I don’t want to hear about how great your backup are, if you don’t do regular restore (even as test), they’re not worth anything.

Reread those last sentences. Important point in a sysadmin life.

Anyway, in the top of the list, I’ll be going to a ‘wine & cheese‘, to Montreal to meet my family, to the church to meet the priest. But, as always, I also need to work. So Sphinx, Chef & Puppet, MySQL Multi-master replication, MySQL snapshot + recovery….

… not counting the fact that a new website is underway for my enterprise (Les Laboratoires Phoenix), that I’m dealing with a designer for new logo and business cards, that my accounting is being entirely re-done to ‘account’ for my migration to a corporation, that I need to finish 3 projects drafts by Monday morning (for the R&D papers), and that I need to complete my invoicing for November.

.Don’t know how others does it, but I guess they just do. Like I’ll be doing this week-end.

PHP version 5.3.1 was just released. This release contains a patch for a denial of service condition we’ve reported on 27 October 2009. The problem is related with PHP’s handling of RFC 1867 (Form-based File upload in HTML).

Source: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/507982

Exploit already on PacketStorm…

The next few hours will see little sleep and lots of action ; More precisely I’ll be deploying lots of hardware (2 IBM SAN, 2 core servers, 2 switchs, 2 APC, 5 branchs servers – supporting up to 20 ‘leaf’/virtual servers), and then somes (3 couples of 2 systems in high redundancy (wackamole IP ‘fencing’, shared-storage through DRBD). All that will go in ‘my’ new 48U cage @Hypertec (old nortel building) to act as a demo for some clients.

Once that’s completed, the true fun start: A very big part of this infrastructure is going to be self-healing, failure resitant and high performance. We are speaking of :

This is going to be solid, scalable, fast : the holy grail of a lot of service provider that are aiming at automatization of their ‘hosting’ business. The result of a lot of planning and testing ; the cutting-edge of cloud-computing.

After a title like that, I’m going to let you down with a very bad news:

Apple cans the ZFS integration project.

I’m really not happy about that, but we can’t do much about it. This is very weird because, last week, I drafted a post about ZFS & XSAN2. It was about my expectation for the world of ‘integrated’ filesystem… guess they are a bit lower now.

Great hiking yesterday, went for a variation of the Wolf Trail near the Blanchet Beach (@Lac Meech). About 350m of elevation gain and 7.5km walk in the forest.

Should be able to post one or two pictures today.

Wolf Trail – 8.3km return, expert, 400m elevation gain – The trail starts at parking lot P13 at Blanchet Beach and continues to a fork where you should keep left. You will shortly pass a beaver pond on your right. Further on the trial intersects with #38 and you should keep right at this point. You’ll next encounter the intersection with trail #1, the Fire Tower Road. The trail at this point is no longer numbered but keep going and you’ll reach you’re objective in no time, the very short spur to the Tawadina Lookout and an excellent overview of the Ottawa Valley. A little further on the trail swings back towards the start passing three more lookouts along the way before the final steep descent to the parking lot. The trail takes about 4 hours to complete.
Source: http://www.out-there.com/gatineau.htm