Re: Security, ownership and daemon startup
Dear Y'all - Paul DuBois writes: At 9:53 AM -0400 5/9/01, Brian Cuttler wrote: The developers that want to use the database would like ownership of the files and daemon so that they can modify and restart at will. Tell them to pick one of their accounts to be used for running the server. You should also look into a security utility called sudo http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/. It allows you to provide and revoke additional authorizations to particular users and to log their activities when using those extra privileges. This allows you to leave the mysql stuff under the ownership of a non-user account and manage all the access business rules via the sudo config file. This worked great for me; I hope it helps you. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
RE: Open Source MySQL Appl. Dev Tools for W2K/NT/W98.
Dear J.T. - Fowler, J.T. writes: This does not have to be fancy with lots of bells whistles. In fact - the simpler the screen interface the better for the people who will be using this. I.E. text entry - tabular displays of valid entry values. Point and click would be nice but really is not required. I'm a little confused by your thinking here. The typical thinking (to which I also ascribe) is that you need better interfaces when your users are less sophisticated. The web has been such a success because it's intuitive. To pick your brain - given what I have written above - which of the tools you listed as having used - would be the simplest overall to use? Although you were quite clear that you want the simplest I'm talking more about what tools are the most productive. Well, let's start with Xemacs. Xemacs is the most powerful text editor that exists and I'm not prone to superlatives. In roles like ours DBA, programmer, sys admin... you spend a large portion of your time on the computer editing text. I've personally made the investment to become familiar with this tool and am grateful that I did. Achieving this comfort level with such a complex tool has taken a lot of time and effort though and you should expect that. If you already have a text editor that you find sufficient then you don't need xemacs, but if it doesn't color code keywords or provide auto-indentation then you should look long and hard at xemacs. There are loads of books on emacs (usually the GNU flavor, xemacs has a more complete GUI). I would start by going through the tutorial and then browsing the *info* documentation. Second pick a database. Oh yeah, you chose MySQL; good choice. Get the Paul Dubois book. Next, decide on the interface, web or not. It may be easier for you to develop a text interface given your limited experience with html but, you should probably bite the bullet here it's not that hard. If you choose to do web you'll have to get and learn the Apache web server fortunately this is really easy to use. It's a little dated but I still use just the O'Reilly book Apache, the definitive guide and on-line docs which come with the software. You can use IIS on NT of course, but it costs money and isn't cross-platform. It is very simple to use. Finally you need to write programs. I prefer perl for several reasons most important are that it there's an enormous collection of freely available pre-existing libraries written by much better programmers than me and it's enormously flexibly so I don't have to know more than one language. I recently heard it referred to as the swiss army chainsaw of programming languages. There are tons of good books. I would start with two again published by O'Reilly they are Learning Perl and Programming Perl. Read the former and use the latter for reference. If however you just want to develop a web application with MySQL you may prefer PHP, it's easier to learn and use. You may want to ask the more specific question of Perl vs. PHP of the MySQL list which has a lot of PHP coders lurking. You don't need UML, though it's quite interesting. Don't use java it's too slow and immature. It doesn't even contain adequate mechanisms for escaping text, good grief. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Re: RPM dependency on MySQL-DBI-perl-bin
Dear Jason - Jason Feingold writes: Hi - Im installing the MySQL-bench-3.23.37-1.i386.rpm, cant install because of a MySQL-DBI-perl-bin dependency. Using the RPM mechanism to install perl modules is fraught with problems. Don't use it; you'll be sorry you did in the long run. But, fear not there is a good solution to your problem. The perl community has developed a solution analogous to RPM called cpan. There is a cpan module that is most likely already installed on your system. You can confirm that by typing 'perl -e use CPAN; ' (without the single quotes) at the command line. If you don't get any wierd error messages you already have the cpan module. (If you don't have it you can download it, and zillions of others, at www.cpan.org. Now that you've got CPAN.pm you can type 'perl -MCPAN -e shell' and follow the reasonably intuitive interactive prompts. There's also documentation available by typing 'perldoc CPAN'. The commands you're going to end up typing in the end are: cpan i /mysql/ cpan install Bundle::DBD::mysql cpan i /dbi/ cpan install Bundle::DBI The cpan tool is built specifically for perl and you will get a more robust install by using it for perl modules. Let me warn you that I haven't installed these modules in a while and you may find that there are C dependencies that I'm forgetting that aren't handled well. If you have problems just write again and I or someone else will be happy to help. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Any low budget database access available ???
Dear me - me writes: I am hoping to find somebody who provides low budget mysql and php access. Buy yourself a copy of Web Techniques magazine and browse the advertisements. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Re: MySQL vs SQLServer vs PostgresSQL
Dear Kevin - Kevin Pratt writes: "IMO - mysql is just a disaster you are inviting on yourself. Isn't there some line about everyone having an opinion... you should see the responses to some recent bug reports ... We have run load tests ourselves, and postgres performs much the same under heavy load as no load, whereas mysql quickly gets slow and then just starts erroring out past a certain point. This is a strange comment. Ignoring for the moment the relative advantages or disadvantages of MySQL and Postgres they seem to say that "heavy load" doesn't impact Postgres' performance. So if we pin the CPU by doing random disk reads it doesn't slow down database functionality? Come on, that's just silly. We have had ihtml/postgres/odbc pooling working well under huge loads during our tests, where mysql could not compete at all. Furthermore postgres has a far richer set of functionality mysql users can only dream about. The broader feature set of Postgres over MySQL doesn't get a lot of intelligent rebuttal. However this is the first time I've ever heard someone claim that Postgres is faster. Will you provide some more detail regarding your "huge loads" and "tests"? Yours (curious now) - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
recommend a good book for connecting from mysql to other dbs
Dear Tom - (Please bear with me for a philosophical prolog.) Tom Beidler writes: I'm running into more and more clients that would like to connect to another database. Say there inventory tracking software. I was wondering if there was a good book out there or a web site that might have some info that I can use to start thinking about strategies of connecting other dbs. PROLOG (See RESPONSE to escape ranting) This question highlights what seems to me to be a consistant theme throughout the list that I don't understand. The DBAs I've worked with in my career tell me that you should always err on the side of excessively methodical. That is, don't enter commands interactively but instead put your SQL in a script and run the script against a test database and only execute it against the production system when you've got it perfect. This ensures that your database machinations are reliably repeatable. Many of the questions on the list sound to me like "How do I write a set of SQL commands that will confirm the validity of a credit card number?" My confusion is, why on earth would you want to? If you're already using a scripting language (at least sometimes) to wrap your SQL then why don't you let it handle these sorts of problems. SQL and the DBMS are absolutely superior at handling a FEW very specific problems (i.e. sorting, writing, fetching). SQL is horrible at everything else. So, back to Tom's original question. Interfacing with other databases potentially in other DBMSs or maybe even data that isn't in a database is not really a database task. It's a programming task. The question that I would want answered is "I want to merge multiple data sources what tool will allow me to do that with all the different types of data I'm interested in?" RESPONSE The answers vary, of course, depending on what the data sources are but you should investigate what is referred to as "ETL" (Extract, Transform, Load). There is an extensive literature around this topic in the data warehousing realm. I'll plug my own preferences and suggest that you solve your problem with scripts written in perl. Perl has available with it a database abstraction mechanism called DBI/DBD that will allow you to access multiple databases in different DBMSs (and here's the kicker) without having to write code that is idiosyncratic to the DBMS. That is, the DBI abstraction allows you to write data sorting, writing, fetching logic (see philosophical ranting above) that is independent of the DBMS which is used to maintain the data. Alligator Descartes Tim Bunce, "Programming the Perl DBI" (O'Reilly, 2000), ISBN 1-56592-699-4 Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
capturing mysql errors in Perl
Dear Yogi - yogi writes: I've got a problem on one of my clients' servers, which is, that the errors mySQL throws are not captured by the Perl CGI using mySQL, but are thrown regardless, meaning that a CGI that provokes an error in mySQL will produce an unspecified "Internal Server Error", which is not very helpful for debugging purposes. It looks as if mySQL goes straight to the OS with the error, instead of giving Perl the chance to handle it? And how can this be avoided? Hmmm, maybe I'm not interpreting your message correctly, but it sounds to me like you're experiencing the standard CGI error handling problem along with perhaps some signal handling. CGIs are awkward to debug using standard web browsers because normally error messages don't have HTTP headers so all you ever get is "Internal Server Error". That's what the browser says when you pass it information that's not properly formatted HTTP. The best way to deal with this problem is to use a pretend browser like the command line or emacs W3 and debug your code that way. As to the perl signal handling I would go to the "Advanced Perl Programming" book. I'd be willing to take a look if you want to share the offending code. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
MySQL vs SQLServer vs PostgresSQL
Dear Kevin - (I can't resist the obvious quip.) Kevin Pratt writes: I have heard mysql is the access for unix... Yes, like emacs is the notepad for unix. Yours (in gentle jest) - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Firewall logged probes on mysql port
Dear Y'all - Gary Huntress writes: I've looked around at basic security sites (sans.org, whitehats.com) This is slightly off topic but another security site I'm finding useful is http://icat.nist.gov/icat.cfm. Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Re: Running crash-me against remote M$ SQL Server
Dear Y'all - Joshua Chamas writes: I believe that perl's DBD::Sybase can be used to connect to MS SQL server. I've never done it myself mind you, but heard it to be true. Vivek Khera writes: Except that perl/DBI requires an underlying C library for the DBMS in question. I understand that the sybase libs might be able to talk to MS SQL server, so that may be an option. This makes sense I'll try that and let everyone know how to do it if I can get it to work. Tristan 'Minty' Colgate writes: The one approach that will almost certainly work is to install perl on the nt box with dbi and dbd::odbcd, then setup dbi proxy betweem the linux box and the nt box, I found a sample config from google on how to do this, though Ive temporarily lost the link. Apparently the php site has alot of info on this aswell, someone here mention freetds as the most viable option, though Ive not got round to trying it yet. This too makes sense. If you find the link please send it on; I'll look for info on this as well. Thanks to all for the help. Yours -Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
Running crash-me against remote M$ SQL Server
Dear Y'all - I've developed a diff-based testing framework in perl. It's used to qualify modifications we want to make to systems (i.e. applying patches, installing applications...) for deployment to a thousand some odd machines. The testing framework runs on linux and tests target machines that run linux, solaris and Windoze NT. One of the capabilities we test on those target machines is the DBMS. The test framework compares crash-me runs on the linux MySQL servers from before and after we make the change and highlights the changes which we then analyze. I also want to run crash-me on the linux box against M$ SQL Server on the NT boxes and see how the results change. It's proving to be difficult to do that. Finally we get to my question. Can anyone give me pointers on how to setup the linux box so that I can run crash-me against the remote NT box's SQL Servers. Crash-me is running fine on the linux test server and I've been experimenting with unixODBC and other utilities. Is there no other solution other than finding a M$ SQL Server ODBC driver that runs on linux and is there such a thing? Yours - Billy - Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
