Tag Archives: FOSS

New Project: MySQL Administration

Posted by on December 21, 2011 No comments

Yep, been some time…

A lot has changed since I last blogged.  I’ve left the financial department and moved to networks and systems.  This, methinks, is the place for me.  Work is a lot of fun these days, it’s very good!  I’m doing some very geeky things, I’ve been doing a lot with virtualization both in VMware and XenServer, I’ve been spending time with enterprise storage and backup solutions and absorbing everything I can from the crew I work with every day.  No day is predictable and I’ve yet to see boredom.  You can’t ask for more in a gig :)

I’m beginning a project which is both going to benefit me personally (because I like to know things) and professionally, MySQL server administration.  In short, there’s a need for somebody to have advanced skills with MySQL and potentially other SQL servers in the future.  I volunteered to be that guy.  I’m about to dive into beginner MySQL and progress into backups, tuning, database replication and high availability (HA).  I’m pretty psyched!  This is pretty much how I felt when I decided that I wanted to do something other than Windows and I jumped (both feet) into Linux.  I’ve got 5 books on hand, I’m beginning with the MySQL Administrator’s Bible and moving on to others from there.  Since I have no (NONE!) experience with MySQL or any database, I think it’ll be a bit of a slow start and will hopefully speed up in time…

I’ll be banging on this as much as possible over the Christmas break this year and we’ll go from there.  I should have no problem building test servers as needed (XenServer is making deploying a Linux VM trivial) and I’m sure I can grab some large collections of test data from existing MySQL databases on campus.  I should have more than I need for the project :)

In other news…  The linuxneophyte.com site is still on hiatus and will probably remain that way forever.  Umm, I guess retired is a better description than hiatus.  I’m thinking that if I blog at all, it’ll be here.  One ring to rule them all so to speak.  I’m not focusing on any single OS, Windows, Linux, Mac…  Use the right tool for the job…  If anyone is interested, my primary machine these days is a MacBook.  For day-to-day use, I don’t think there’s a better hardware/OS combo.  It’s simple enough to run Windows in a VM if you need it, you can install a whole collection of command line tools to get real work done and I don’t care who you are, you have to admit, Apple makes pretty hardware.

…and now, bed.

Before I go, here’s something a little cool, it turns out that one of the authors of the administrator’s bible (Sheeri K. Cabral) earned her education @ Brandeis.  Kind of slick that I’ll be taking skills she’s handing me and employing them @ the same Uni.

Sheeri, if you see this in a Google alert, /me says hi!

M

 

Summer In Review, Episode 1: The Outlook Menace

Posted by on October 24, 2008 No comments

This summer, the Uni moved to a new mail system.  We left behind the customized IMAP over TLS/SMTP over SSL setup for a newer, supported and more advanced setup.  The new back-end is Zimbra Collaboration Suite.  Being that this isn’t only a mail system, but a collaboration suite (hence the nifty title) it’ll also support calendaring and IM.

Pre-migration, my group used Thunderbird to access their mail via IMAP over SSL.  When there weren’t server problems (of which there were a few) this was a fast, easy and slick method of managing email.  We had access to an LDAP server for campus addresses and Thunderbird was especially apt at narrowing down your list of addresses as you filled in a To:/From: field (this is something I miss on a daily basis).  For personal and collected addresses there was the Thunderbird address book.  TB provides strong searching utils (quick search and advanced), tagging (custom tags, not just colored, nameless flags) and threading (something I used for lists, came in VERY handy).  That’s just out of the box, with add-ons, applying notes to messages and working with PGP messages is trivial.

For years, TB served us and did it well.  The only complaints I got, were about missing features, of course, the features weren’t missing, it was always a lack of know-how on the part of the complainant.  Well, that’s almost true, TB was lacking in some respects, and it was lacking in our infrastructure as much as in TB.  Obviously, the lack of calendar integration was an issue.  Our calendar system was proprietary and TB (even with the Lightning plugin) wasn’t going to work with it.  You also had the personal address book and other configuration options stored on the desktop instead of the server.  For me, that was always less than ideal.

Enter the new hope, Zimbra.  Zimbra has been dubbed an Exchange killer and as such is supposed to allow you to do everything Exchange can do (and more) without having to run Exchange.  I like this idea (it’s the love of F/OSS that pleases me here) and for the most part, Zimbra fits the bill (this isn’t going to be a review of Zimbra).

Now that we have back-end software that supports MAPI (Exchange protocol), I decided to give Outlook (OL) a shot.  As a matter of fact (and to save time and whining) I’ll just tell you, I recommended that we move to Outlook, got the approval and did the deed.  We’re all using it now and will be for the foreseeable future.

We use OL for a single reason, integrated mail, address book and calendar.  I had a difficult time opting to go with OL, it IS a weak mail client.  I have lists of annoyances, but this is because I like software that works, makes working with it easy and generally doesn’t suck.  That said, I’m betting that the integration will make the lives of my people easier.  In the end, that’s my job.  Find what’s best for them, show them how it’s best for them and make it work.

Time will tell what happens.  Today we’re still using the old calendar and client to access it.  Essentially all we’ve done is change mail clients.  Once the calendar service is rolled out, perhaps my dislike for outlook will ease up a bit.  I’m hoping so.

Oh and the results…  For the most part, people are completely indifferent to pretty OK.  To them it’s just email, click new, add address, add subject (sometimes), fill in the body and click send.  If it works, it’s good.  I have a few folks (more technical people) who realize that in the email department, we did downgrade, but they understand why and we’re changing how we do things to fit the OL way.

I hope to do some playing with folder sharing (something we couldn’t do with IMAP and TB) I’ll post about it and hopefully have some nice things to say :)

Stay tuned for Summer in Review, Episode 2: Attack of Dell Image Direct (note: titles are subject to change without notice).

Open Source IMAP and Mail Client Joy

Posted by on May 3, 2008 No comments

OK, so I had a fun ass day. Yesterday I sent a message to the GNHLUG folks so I could get a recommendation on an IMAP server. I got a few and had to decide between Dovecot and Courier. Both are open source solutions and the winner will be running on my Debian Etch (Linux for those that don’t know) box (which is in a VMware virtual machine).

I decided to implement IMAP so that I could hit my mail from multiple clients instead of just mutt. While I have no problem just using mutt, I can’t ask Natalie to. It’s a console program (no pretty clicky menus) and driven by keyboard shortcuts that have meaning for me and nobody else in the world. I have an email folder that gets all of the notifications of online statements from all of the people we have to give our money to each month. I want her to be able to look at it if she chooses. Yeah, I could forward messages to her mail account or go about this any other number of ways, but setting up a mail server gives me other benee’s and it’s just fun to play with this stuff.

I won’t bore you with the details of configuring the server or making the config changes I needed in my mail clients, but I will tell you that I went with Dovecot and that both mutt and Thunderbird are amazingly flexible and powerful tools. I loved them before, I want to marry them now.

Since I’ve been using mutt for a couple of years now, I’ve grown very accustomed to managing email from 9 accounts (and a lot of it) with folders in one program. I’ve got it set up so that a particular email address and PGP key is selected based on what folder I’m composing/replying to messages in. It’s VERY handy. I never have to worry about which email address is responding to what list or friend. As long as my mail filtering is working properly, my client does the work. That all probably sounds confusing, so as an example, if I’m replying to a message in my Gmail folder, then the program knows that I want to reply with my @gmail.com address and the corresponding PGP key. I wanted the same capability in my GUI client. Enter Thunderbird and the “Enigmail” and “Folder Account” add-ons. It allows me to do just that, I simply need to select which identity to assign to a particular folder and I’m done. It really is that easy. It takes a few minutes to configure your identities and the GPG keys that go with them, a few changes to folder properties and BAM!

Folks, try doing that with Outlook. I’ll wait… Oh you couldn’t? Not surprising, MS doesn’t think you want to use PGP so it’s not an option. Never mind how common and effective it is. You’ll have to go out and buy PGP Desktop. No thanks, I’ll stick with the open source programs that have great devs & users who contribute to the project. The combination just produces far superior tools. That’s *almost* all from the Outlook bashing front for today, but there’ll prolly be more later. I’ve been using it at work for a few weeks now and it SUCKS. The ONLY thing it does right is integrate mail and calendaring if you have a MAPI backend, other than that… meh. There, now that really is the last of the OL smash for today.

So I now have all I wanted from my mail server and I’m super pleased. It took almost no time to set up. It would have gone even faster if I had any sed or shell scripting skills. Ahh well, something to work on.