Thoughts on the take over of MySQL AB by Sun.

The buzz in the blogosphere yesterday could hardly be missed. MySQL AB and Sun Microsystems announced they reached a final agreement for the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems. First of all, I think that it is very important that there is a difference between MySQL AB (the company) and MySQL the open source Database engine.
MySQL doesn’t “own” MySQL. Mysql is an open source project, so the source is free to modify and use etc according to the GPL license.

The people of MySQL AB seem to be very happy with the take-over. I can imagine that. It will give for sure some financial ease of mind for the company and his employees and access to a large source of knowledge and resources. Somehow many people, including myself, have a suspicion against “the big corporations”. With the exception of Apple computers ofc :).
Don’t forget however that Sun has a decent and reliable history with Open Source. Open Office and making Java open source to name 2 big achievements of Sun.
I use MySQL now for close to 9 years. I have learned to love this database engine, discovering the more advanced features of SQL step by step. I only have used MySQL directly or interfaced by PHP.
I can only express my hope that Sun will support the continuous development of the MySQL API as used by the MySQLi or mysqlnd extensions of PHP.
Some analysts suspect that Sun is busy to build his “own” alternative to the classic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. The Sun-Stack would be SAMJ (Solaris (opensourced!), Apache, MySQL, Java).
People should have the freedom to use and code the language they prefer.
I really hope it won’t be soon that if you want to have the full support for the capabilities of MySQL, you have to use a Java interface to interact with the database engine from a web-environment.

Thoughts on freeBSD

A very busy week, but during my activities I found the time to experiment with freeBSD.
First on a very old IBM pentium 166mmx, but later this week on a unexpected present, a compaq PII 266 mhz.

I’m impressed.

The install process is , well, like going back in time, but quite simple. Not the fancy dandy RedHat install screens (let alone OS X) but nice ASCII screens. I did an FTP install, maybe the full iso’s do have graphical setup screens.

I like the total control feeling of the freeBSD install proces. Clear questions and good documentation in the install screens.
And after the first boot, the netstat -an command, shows, well., basically nothing.
How different from a default redhat or fedora install.

Only port 22 and udp 514 (syslog) open. wow.
No RPC, portmap or NFS bollocks I ever use.

freeBSD has a new addict.

I’ll post my further findings on gargleblaster.
In the next weeks I’ll migrate my mail and dns server from RH9 and fedora to freeBSD.

Mark email read with procmail

This was bothering me since I installed SpamAssassin on my mailserver. SpamAssassin is called by procmail, and after the email is scanned, the mail is further processed by, again, procmail.

Email marked as spam is put in the Spam-directory by procmail.
So far, so good. Only…because the filtering is done by procmail, and not by the Apple mail program, every spam-email was marked as unread and could not be set to read by Apple mail automatically. So once a day I had to go down to my spam-directory to mark the spam-mails as read…rather stupid…

Today I had enough…A search in google solved the problem in 3 minutes…the problem which bothered me for months…

The solution:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
| formail -I "Status: R" >> mail/Reclame/spam


Bind 9 logging configuration

Since the time I mastered building my own DNS server, I was unhappy with the logging configuration.

I like daemons generating a certain amount of verbose output. I helps me understanding how such daemons work and it’s usefull for troubleshooting (duh).

But when I was finished building my DNS Server, I did not feel like it to spent some more time finetuning the logging part of named.conf.

Until yesterday…after some digging around in man named.conf it turned out to be much more simple that I had thought…


logging{
channel "bind_log" {
file "/var/log/named/bind.log" versions 3 size 25m;
severity info;
print-time yes;
print-severity yes;
print-category yes;
};
channel "query_log" {
file "/var/log/named/query.log" versions 3 size 25m;
severity info;
print-time yes;
};
category lame-servers { null; };
category queries { "query_log"; };
category default{ "bind_log"; };
};


I hope the above helps anyone….[time=1071397561

CompTIA Linux+

Yeeha…

Today at 10 AM CET I entered the examroom at “edunoord” in Leeuwarden.
63 minutes later I walked happily out of the same room. In my hands a printed report saying:

Passed!

he he I guess I can call myself from now on a LCP… Linux certified professional….