Lenz Grimmer's blog

Since the beginning of this year, I'm a happy Lenovo ThinkPad T440 user. All components are supported on Linux (currently running Ubuntu 14.04 on it) — everything Just Worked "out of the box" after the installation. This has been my experience with all previous ThinkPad models so far (I also owned a T42, T60 and T420 before).

The laptop came with Windows 8 pre-installed, which I found very confusing to use (I haven't had actively worked with Windows for quite some time). But since I replaced the built-in hard disk drive with an SSD anyway (a 500GB Samsung EVO 840), that problem was solved quite quickly. Installing Linux via an USB stick was a simple affair, it most cases you can simply download and dd the ISO image on the USB stick and select it as the boot device on the next reboot by pressing F12 at the right moment.

However, not having Windows installed on another partition and not owning an external CD-ROM/DVD-drive, I now faced one problem: how to update the BIOS? Lenovo only provides a Windows-based tool and an ISO image that contains the BIOS update utility and the new firmware. However, this ISO-Image does not boot from an USB stick directly, so the dd method does not work.

Fortunately, like many times before, the ThinkWiki came to the rescue — their page about BIOS update without optical disk gave me the right clues. I downloaded the ISO image containing the BIOS update from the Lenovo Support web site and plugged in an empty USB stick, which appeared as /dev/sdc in the device list (the T440 has a built-in 16GB SSD on /dev/sdb.

The ISO image actually contains a (bootable) hard disk image, which can be dumped on an USB stick directly. To extract the image, I used geteltorito from the genisoimagepackage:

$ geteltorito -o bios.img gjuj13us.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20 
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 32768 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios.img".
$ sudo dd if=bios.img of=/dev/sdc
32768+0 records in
32768+0 records out
16777216 bytes (17 MB) copied, 0,641393 s, 26,2 MB/s

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 16.0 GB, 16013942784 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15272 cylinders, total 31277232 sectors
Units = sectors of 1  512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1             32       32767       16368    1  FAT12

There's my bootable USB stick. Rebooting the laptop and choosing the USB stick from the boot menu (F12) properly booted into the BIOS update utility and allowed me to update the BIOS to the latest version. No Windows required!

I'm happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.15. It is now available for download from http://lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/ and https://launchpad.net/mylvmbackup

Probably the biggest highlight of 0.15 is the addition of zbackup as an additional backup type. I'd like to thank Ivan Korjavin for contributing this new feature.

Additionally, this release provides several improvements and bug fixes. For example, it's now possible to back up more than a single my.cnf configuration file by providing a directory name like /etc/mysql instead.

Please see the ChangeLog and bzr history for more details.

I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual suspects (e.g. Maatkit), some of these are actually collections of different utilities by themselves. As it's impossible to go over each individual component in the given time frame, I will try to pick out the most popular/useful parts related to the scopes mentioned above. But I will also cover some lesser known gems that migh be worth taking a look at. What's your the most valued tool in your toolchest? I am still looking for more inspiration.

I look forward to being at the conference again and meeting with colleagues and friends in the MySQL community. Judging from the current schedule, it will be a very interesting mix of talks.

If you're interested in attending, you should consider registering soon! The early registration ends on March 15th. Until then, I encourage you to make use of this "Friend of Speaker" discount code (25% off): mys10fsp

While browsing the many blog entries on blogs.sun.com about the MySQL Acquisition (thanks a lot for the very warm welcome!), I stumbled over this (Python-based) utility: SnapBack, a tool that uses ZFS snapshots to perform physical backups of MySQL databases on Solaris. Very cool! This is actually something I was wanting to add to the mylvmbackup script, too - I have to take a closer look at how this is done (I tried to install OpenSolaris on a VirtualBox instance, but it caused it to crash the emulator).
 

Since the very early days, the MySQL distribution packages contain a very useful commandline-tool named replace. As the name implies, it can be used to replace strings in text files. From the documentation:

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the standard input. Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file [file] ...
shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file

from represents a string to look for and to represents its replacement. There can be one or more pairs of strings. Use the -- option to indicate where the string-replacement list ends and the filenames begin. In this case, any file named on the command line is modified in place, so you may want to make a copy of the original before converting it. replace prints a message indicating which of the input files it actually modifies. If the -- option is not given, replace reads the standard input and writes to the standard output. replace uses a finite state machine to match longer strings first. It can be used to swap strings. For example, the following command swaps a and b in the given files, file1 and file2:

shell> replace a b b a -- file1 file2 ...

This comes in very handy, especially if you need to replace a similar text in a large number of files, or if you need to replace multiple different strings in a file at the same time! So next time you need to replace strings in text files, take a look at this hidden gem!

Unfortunately the string matching does not support regular expressions - but the source code actually documents some additional options:

Special characters in from string:
  ^  Match start of line.
  \$  Match end of line.
  \b  Match space-character, start of line or end of line.
        For end \b the next replace starts locking at the end space-character.
        An \b alone or in a string matches only a space-character.
  \r, \t, \v as in C.

The programs make a DFA-state-machine of the strings and the speed isn't
dependent on the count of replace-strings (only of the number of replaces).
A line is assumed ending with \n or \0.
There are no limit exept memory on length of strings.