Venu Anuganti Blog

Its been a while I wrote anything on MySQL and/or Database related things as I was on a long two month vacation and immediately had a job change.

Today I was playing a bit in trying to setup up the ZRM community backup on Cent OS 5 to have a incremental backup mechanism; to see how it works as I never had a chance to use it so far. In the process, I could not find a single source of document which explains the basic steps needed on first-hand setup (or my search did not yield the right docs), so thought of writing and noting it down myself for any future reference. More or less, the instructions should be same for any Linux favor.

Here are the steps:

• First install perl-DBI and perl-XML-Parser modules

  sudo yum install perl-DBI perl-XML-Parser
• Download and install ZRM package.

  sudo rpm -ivh MySQL-zrm-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

  Password:

  warning: MySQL-zrm-2.0-1.noarch.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 3c5d1c92

  Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]

     1:MySQL-zrm              ########################################### [100%]

  Checking and Migrating old ZRM data
• Create user called `backup_user` identified by `backup_user` in MySQL

  mysql> GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'backup_user'@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'backup_user';

  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

  mysql> flush privileges;

  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

• Add a new directory under /etc/mysql-zrm/ as ‘dailyrun’ and copy the mysql-zrm.conf to this directory

  sudo mkdir -p /etc/mysql-zrm/dailyrun

  sudo cp /etc/mysql-zrm/mysql-zrm.conf /etc/mysql-zrm/dailyrun/

• Start editing the file /etc/mysql-zrm/dailyrun/mysql-zrm.conf and fill some of basic information and leave backup-level=1 and backup-mode=raw. The conf-file self-explains on every parameter, so it becomes easy for anyone to setup even for first time.

• Start testing the backup using mysql-zrm-scheduler by issuing:

  sudo mysql-zrm-scheduler --now --backup-set dailyrun

• Once tested, add it to the standard daily scheduler to backup at 1 AM:

  mysql-zrm-scheduler --add --interval daily --start 01:00 --backup-set dailyrun

I am not going further to explain on how to verify the backup and restore it back, even though they are straight forward by using the ZRM utilities provided by the Zmanda; and complete information can be found from here.

I brought the new iPhone 3G the same day I came back from India as the 1st generation iPhone was handed over to my sister during the India visit.

After installing few new iPhone applications from AppStore; I noticed the phone seems to crash on and off and sometimes the response to keystrokes literally used to take ~10s also. And not to say; some times I can’t even end the call that easily.

Finally I called the iPhone support, and after explaining everything the customer representative told me that the 2.1 software addresses all the issues (which actually released on the same day). So, after updating with 2.1 (one need iTunes 8 inorder to work with 2.1 updated iPhone); everything seems to be positive and works like a charm.

At least I don’t see any issues that I had in the last week; and good thing is; 2.1 also looks like fixed the batter drain issue; lets see how long the batter will stay from now onwards.

Today is my last day @Yahoo!. It is my first ever short stay in any company that I worked so far, but I do not regret for leaving.

I decided to leave two months back but as I had a vacation in the middle (India trip), I have to postpone till am back. During my stay at Yahoo! I learned enough from rest of the MySQL geeks but I miss the whole geek community, which I doubt any company will have such a great MySQL folks.

Personally what I learned from Yahoo! is that, I needed to be in a company and/or team; where the management knows what the engineers actually do and capable of delivering rather than what was presented by managers itself from down the layers.

Anyway, I have multiple offers to continue as DB internals developer along with DB architect positions; but I will evaluate carefully in the next few days before I make up my mind as opposed to what I did in my last job search.