Racker Hacker

Version 0.8.6 of MySQLTuner is now available. It contains a few bug fixes and readability improvements:

Newlines are placed between the sections for increased readability
Each section now contains extra lines to set the sections apart. It makes the output a little longer, but easier to read as well.

Storage engine status color bug
Even if the –nocolor option was passed, the storage engine statuses were being shown in color.

Excluded information_schema from storage engine calculations
The information_schema database was causing extra MEMORY tables to show up in the calculations. They’re now excluded when the calculations are being made.

Shawn Ashlee has also been added as a contributor as he’s been a constant help for the project. He’s recommended implementation ideas and he has worked to create internal MySQLTuner RPM’s for use at Rackspace. Thanks, Shawn!

I recently came across a server that was throwing this error into its message log:

ntpd_initres[2619]: ntpd returns a permission denied error!

It would only appear about every five minutes on the server, and restarting ntpd didn’t correct the issue. I stopped ntpd entirely, but the error still appeared a few minutes later.

After examining the running processes, I found that there was a lonely ntpd process that was running using a non-standard method. I killed that process, started the default instance of ntpd using the init scripts, and the issue went away.

It turns out that ntpd daemon that was started manually was unable to access some of the required paths and sockets that is necessary for ntpd to run properly. These configuration items are set up in the init scripts, but they’re not included when ntpd is running manually.

This was tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

Due to popular demand, I’ve created a mailing list for MySQLTuner. It will be a low-traffic list consisting of new version announcements and bug fixes.

If you want to subscribe, simply send an e-mail with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line to mysqltuner-announce-request@mysqltuner.com. Be sure to add mysqltuner-announce@mysqltuner.com to your mail provider’s whitelist.

If you see a large mail queue and your system’s I/O is increasing, you may find messages like these in your syslog:

Losing q5/qfg9N5EwE3004499: savemail panic
SYSERR(root): savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere

In this situation, there’s some reason why sendmail cannot deliver e-mail to the postmaster address. There’s a few issues that can create this problem:

• Missing postmaster alias in /etc/aliases
• Hard disk is full
• The mail spool for the postmaster has the wrong ownership
• The mbox file for the postmaster is over 2GB and procmail can’t deliver the e-mail

First, correct the situation that is preventing sendmail from delivering the e-mail to the postmaster user. Then, stop sendmail, clear the e-mail queue, and start sendmail again.

I found this issue on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 server and then found the solution on Brandon’s site.

To get the latest copy, head over to the download page! Here’s the changes from 0.8.0 to 0.8.5 for MySQLTuner:

Fixed a copy/paste bug
There was a bug in 0.8.0 that displayed “OK” in red rather than showing “!!”. It affected the informational “–” outputs as well. Thanks to Nils Breunese for pointing out that confusing bug!

Fixed a data length calculation bug with MySQL 4.0
If the script was run against MySQL 4.0 servers, it would return the Max_data_length rather than Data_length, and this was returning some horribly incorrect results for the size of tables in use with certain storage engines.

Fixed a key buffer calculation bug with MySQL 4.0
It’s not possible to ask a MySQL 4.0 server about how much of the key buffer is in use, so the functionality for MySQL 4.0 now matches 3.23 for key buffer calculations.

Added a notification for well-optimized servers
For situations where MySQLTuner can’t make any recommendations for performance increases, it actually says so now.

Version bump to 0.8.5
It’s getting close to a full 1.0 release!

I botched my upgrade to 2.3.3 for a short while (sorry for the errors!), but everything is back to normal now. There’s a critical XMLRPC vulnerability in 2.3.2, so you might want to upgrade soon!

I’m going to take two weeks off from posting on RackerHacker and I’m going to put that time towards bringing the next version of boxcheck.com to fruition. I’ve been hit with a lot of requests, and it seems to be a tool that people find pretty useful!

I’ll keep updating the blog as I get closer to releasing the next version. Also, as soon as a beta is available, I will certainly let you know!