mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Lenny server.

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on an Ubuntu 12.10 server.

This really quick and dirty way to create your own Debian or Ubuntu packages can be done by anyone with little previous package creation experience. Even if you've never even compiled an application, I'll show you just how easy it is to download source code, compile the program and bundle everything up in a .deb package you can share with anyone.

SphinX is a great full-text search engine for MySQL. Installing the Sphinx daemon was straightforward as you can compile it from the source or use a .DEB/.RPM package but SphinxSE was a little bit tricky since it needed to be installed as a plugin on a running MySQL server. So if you use Debian or Centos and install your MySQL from a .deb or .rpm package this is how you do it.

If your build from source is successful, you can make a Debian (Ubuntu) package (.deb) for future use:

You can download and install the package directly from debian sid (tested and works on ubuntu natty too )
http://packages.debian.org/sid/flamerobin
Also you and read the full ChangeLog

Firebird 3.0 is now uploaded and accepted into official Debian experimental repository (this is the first upload so things will break also you must backup database from 2.5 and restore into 3.0)

"This article will show how you can rebuild any debian package. You might need to rebuild a package for various reasons: add/remove some compilation options, make some changes to the sources, or compile a newer version from testing/sid into stable, etc. Regardless of your reason, this can be done very easy using debian tools..."

When you rent a dedicated server nowadays, almost all providers give you FTP backup space for your server on one of the provider's backup systems. This tutorial shows how you can use duplicity and ftplicity to create encrypted (so that nobody with access to the backup server can read sensitive data in your backups) backups on the provider's remote backup server over FTP. ftplicity is a duplicity wrapper script (provided by the German computer magazine c't) that allows us to use duplicity without interaction (i.e., you do not have to type in any passwords).