Tag Archives: system administration

Transferring Large MySQL Databases with both MyISAM and InnoDB Tables

While setting up a development environment on my laptop, Nathan and I came across a bit of a problem: How do you transfer large databases in a way that a) works for databases with a mix of MyISAM and InnoDB tables, b) doesn’t take an eternity, and c) won’t wipe out any existing data on your server? After scouring forums and blog posts, I mixed a number of methods and came up with my own super awesome method! It’s pretty easy, and is much faster and more reliable than a straight MySQL dump:
  1. Copy database files from the old server to the new one. On the both servers, find your MySQL data directories. In WAMP, that directory is located at ‘WAMP\bin\mysql\mysql[version]\data\’. In MAMP, that directory is located at ‘MAMP/db/mysql/’ In LAMP, that directory is located at ‘LAMP/var/lib/mysql/’ Continue reading →

The Internet is Down

It seems like my problems earlier today were symptomatic of something a fair bit larger. Several major sites (ebay.com, about.com, livejournal.com, perhaps others) are inaccessible by both ping and tracert. Equally strange, the tracerts all seem to fail at completely different locations. And I have tried originating them both from my development machine in Canada, and a remote server in California. (PS: If you know what I’m talking about, try your own tracert to ebay.com and/or about.com and post in the comments!) Even MORE strange, the websites themselves are accessible! I can pull up ebay.com in a browser, or grab it with wget. But I can’t ping it?! Before today I would’ve said that’s impossible. If you’re an internet guru (or just know what’s up here), please enlighten me.

What a day

I had plans for today. I was going to do some coding.. add the new Google +1 thinger to SearchTempest, update the FAQ, port some stuff from that FAQ over to the AutoTempest FAQ, tweak the ads on SearchTempest, even work on a new feature or two! … my server had other ideas. I had an email waiting for me this morning from someone who couldn’t find an ad they had posted using SearchTempest. These are fairly frequent, and 98% of the time it’s for one of the reasons covered here. When the emailer claims to have already read the FAQ, that number drops to about 97%. 🙂 This case was no different. What was different was that when I pulled up SearchTempest to verify its omniscience, it took about 47 seconds for the homepage to come up. I pay way too much for screaming fast internet, so this was definitely not normal. Took a look at the apache logs, and noticed a bunch of entries like this:
mod_fcgid: can’t apply process slot for [filename]
mod_fcgid is a fastcgi module for apache, which allows apache (the web server) to talk to things like php without having to load them inside the server itself. This is great for a bunch of reasons that I won’t get into here. What wasn’t great was that it was out of processes. The server is configured such that it should handle many times the current peak load of the sites (just in case I get slashdotted or what have you.. 🙂 ), so that shouldn’t happen. At this point I’m kind of freaking out because a) all you fine people can’t access SearchTempest, b) the other fine people who probably aren’t reading this because they’re new users are now thinking that SearchTempest is crap and doesn’t work!, and c) I’m nearing the end of my very limited LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) debugging abilities. I sent off a somewhat panicked message to the support folks at the company I lease the server from, then, as is my way, proceeded to get in their way trying to debug the problem myself at the same time. Continue reading →