Jan 27


If you hadn’t heard the fervent rumors over the past few weeks about Apple’s impending tablet computer, you’ll no doubt hear about the real deal: the iPad. It’s a mid-size, thin, fast, multi-touch tablet computer running an enhanced version of the iPhone OS and including Bluetooth, WiFi, and optional 3G connectivity. I’ll leave you to watch the video or drool over the specs & pricing.

Since I’m on-call 24/7 and must be ready to respond whether I’m on the couch or on a long trip, my primary workstation is the thin & light MacBook Air. I certainly wouldn’t mind carrying just an iPad with me wherever I went, but there are a few caveats for a server admin like me. While the iPhone OS’s copy & paste support is stellar and was worth the wait, the lack of multitasking could certainly make life more tedious in some cases or downright impossible in others. The iPad supports current iPhone/iPod touch applications at their existing resolutions (or at 2x size) and I have no doubt that the developers of SSH apps and such will update them to support the new resolution & keyboards quite quickly, but there are key apps missing. They’ve developed excellent new versions of the iWork apps for use on the iPad, but I’d need them to port Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, and Apple Remote Desktop for me to actually give up my MacBook Air.

It’s sexy. It has the potential. It certainly has the screen resolution and performance to take on such tasks. I’ll even guarantee that plenty of third-party tools will be developed for server admins using the iPad, but I hope Apple sees the light and brings over their own admin tools as well.

Jan 18

While Jimmy has previously covered disabling MySQL’s binary logging for those who don’t need it and don’t want to worry about the unexpected disk space usage, others prefer to merely purge older binary logs to reclaim disk space. MySQL’s binary logs live in /var/mysql and appear as mysql-bin.000001. Some of my servers merely hosting a few weblogs have bin logs taking up 4K-1MB, but others hosting large web applications have bin logs in the 1GB range. The last thing you want is for the drive hosting your MySQL databases to fill up unexpectedly.

Here’s a one-liner for removing all MySQL bin logs older than 30 days:

sudo find /var/mysql -name "mysql-bin.0*" -mtime +30 -exec rm {} +

Obviously, any command like this that automates deletion of potentially needed data could be disastrous, so make sure you have a good backup of your data before you try it. The benefit of the above command is that you can remove ‘-exec rm {} +‘ from the end of it to do a dry-run without actually removing any files and it’ll merely list the file names. Also, if you want preserve all bin logs newer than 60 days, simply change to read ‘-mtime +60‘, or whatever best fits your needs.

Depending on your usage & backup setup, you could certainly automate this using cron or launchd.