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All hail S.M.A.R.T. and external USB hard disk drives!

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on
Long time no post! Last Sunday I spotted the following email in my junk mailfolder: 
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:08:39 +0200
From: root <root@metis.lenznet>
To:  <lenz@localhost.metis.lenznet>
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: metis

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name: metis
  DNS domain: lenznet
  NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.
Which did not sound too good. In addition to that, the system had failed to resume from a suspend to disk earlier that day - the kernel experienced disk read errors while trying to load the suspended image from the swap partition. Fortunately a fresh reboot still worked and I ran a more thorough analysis of the disk drive by using smartctl -t long /dev/hda. Using various Open Source tools from a SUSE Linux 10.1 rescue system (which boots off the first installation CD) helped me to backup and restore my data without losing anything (except for some time, of course). Continue reading "All hail S.M.A.R.T. and external USB hard disk drives!"

MySQL at the FrOSCon Conference

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on
 On June 24th/25th, the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) will be held in Sankt Augustin, Germany. I have submitted two talks (in english), which both got accepted: "MySQL Administration: Backup and Security Strategies on Linux" and "The MySQL Business Model: Where and how we thrive". The sessions will take place on Saturday, but I will be around on Sunday, too. In addition to my sessions, there will be two more MySQL-related talks: "MySQL Cluster: an Introduction - A journey into High Availability" by Geert Vanderkelen (one of our MySQL Cluster Support experts) and "Pivot tables in MySQL 5 - creating cross-tabulation with MySQL 5 stored routines" by fellow PlanetMySQL blogger and MySQL Guilds Member Giuseppe Maxia. All in all the conference program sounds very interesting and offers a lot of diverse topics. See you there!

Presenting mylvmbackup 0.1

Posted by Lenz Grimmer on
With all the recent buzz on Planet MySQL about using LVM to perform "semi-hot" backups of MySQL on Linux, I remembered that we once created such a Perl script for a server project that we worked on in cooperation with a hardware vendor. As this particular backup method was also mentioned and recommended in my talk about MySQL backup and security on Linux and the script hasn't actually been publicly available so far, I offered to take over the ownership and release it under the GPL. The first tarball release (0.1) is now available from this web page (still work in progress), the files are available via SVN from here as well. Make sure to see the README and TODO files for the current status. A man page is included, too. I hope you will find it useful - feedback is very welcome!
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