Stupid MySQL

What kind of daemon process doesn’t detach itself from the TTY upon execution? The mysqld, for one. So when I rebooted my server late last night and it started to come back up, it got to mysql and stopped, having exec()ed the init process into the mysqld process. So mysqld and any other processes that had already started were running fine, but nothing else (including the web server) ever saw the light of day. THEN, my internet connection died, so I couldn’t even get into my server to fix the problem. I waited about an hour and my connection still didn’t come back up, so I went to bed. So my site was unavailable from about 1AM to about 1PM today.

Posted by Anthony on Mar 12, 2004 | 7 replies
Filed under: General

Comments:

01. Mar 12, 2004 at 02:58pm by Tasha Moyer:

Hmmm, none of that makes sense anyway, but what does ’daemon’ mean? Is it like demon?

02. Mar 12, 2004 at 03:26pm by Patrick Copland:

Daemon is kinda like a process that runs all the time on a server, right?

I heard good things about MySQL in the past year. I am sure you are running a newer build, right?

03. Mar 12, 2004 at 03:42pm by Anthony:

: )

Contrary to popular belief, daemons aren’t nearly as evil as demons. Daemon is an acronym for "disk and execution monitor." But nowadays, it basically just means any program that starts when you start your computer and doesn’t stop until you shut the computer off (as Patrick said). So on the computer that my website lives on, the Apache webserver program is a daemon.

The problem was that when the mysql daemon started, it took over the init process, which is responsible for task scheduling and starting other processes, like Apache. What mysqld should have done -- like the other nice daemons -- is go into the background and pass control back to init, so that init could continue starting the other daemons, such as Apache.

And about my mysql build.... no, I’m running a stinking old version. My server runs Debian, and apt-get install mysql says:

Package mysql has no available version, but exists in the database.
This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency and
never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the contents
of sources.list
E: Package mysql has no installation candidate

I think I need to edit the Debian sources.list file and change some stuff so that it looks in newer places for the mysql package. Ugh, I hate Debian. I hate how even with the "unstable" sources, the packages are always a month or two behind the current source for any given program. Just give me Slackware and let me compile my own stuff :)

04. Mar 13, 2004 at 06:43am by steev:

gentoo.... heh

05. Mar 13, 2004 at 12:36pm by Anthony:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.... convince me

06. Mar 16, 2004 at 02:02pm by andy:

i thought you didn’t even USE sql, why not just axe it?

07. Mar 16, 2004 at 05:38pm by Anthony:

Well, I use it for my login script, and I’m going to convert my blogger script to it one of these days.