Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Bedtime for Bonzo
[The rant that was here has been removed, but don't worry—the sentiments expressed in this rant will be discussed at a later time. Suffice to say, I don't like change. —Sean][You can say that again. —Editor]
Insane “out-of-the-box” thinking
Last night's redacted rant (okay, technically very early this morning) had to do with a crisis of confidence at work (the proverbial straw last night was replying to a trouble ticket with a huge rant with some fairly strong language <cough cough> about package management systems and forgetting to tick the “staff only” option—oops) and wondering why Smirk even puts up with my curmudgeonly tendencies.
I guess I found out why today. Smirk called with a rather interesting problem. One of our clients lost the administrative password to MySQL and could we reset it? We didn't have the administrative password either. Smirk tried the “recommended procedure” in this case:
- Shutdown MySQL:
/etc/init.d/mysql stop - Restart MySQL with an option to bypass authentication:
mysqld_safe skip-grant-tables & - Reset the administrative password:
mysqladmin -u root password "newpassword"(or some variation on this—there are several different ways to do this actually) - Shutdown MySQL—here you may need to find the process id and kill it, since you didn't use the startup scripts to start it.
- Restart MySQL using the startup scripts:
/etc/init.d/mysql start
only to fail in step three. That's when he called me.
I did get the password reset, which is what Smirk (and the customer) really wanted. What I did not do was:
- Shutdown MySQL:
/etc/init.d/mysql stop - Create the text file
$HOME/mysql-initwith the following contents:UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('MyNewPass') WHERE User='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; - Restart MySQL:
mysqld_safe --init-file=$HOME/mysql-init & - Delete the text file:
/bin/rm $HOME/mysql-init
(as I found out after the fact). No, I think differently. I live on the edge. I do things the hard core way:
- Shutdown MySQL:
/etc/init.d/mysql stop - Copy critical files:
/var/lib/mysql/mysql/user.* /tmp/ - Using a binary editor, zero out the administrative password in
the file
/var/lib/mysql/mysql/user.MYD(told you I live on the edge, and yes, I used a binary editor I wrote for this—Muahahahaha!) - Restart MySQL:
/etc/init.d/mysql start - Reset the administrative password for MySQL
I think Smirk keeps me around for my “out-of-the-box” (or is that “out-of-my-ever-loving-mind”?) thinking.
MTV's The Real World: “Work”
In this week's episode of MTV's The Real World “Work” we find Devyn (and to a small degree, Sarah) working for Jovani, Chet working as an interviewer and an interviewee, Baya (and to a small degree, Sarah) working out at dancing, Katelynn working to launch a website for a local commuity outreach center, Ryan working the guitar, JD working the camera for Chet, and Scott working hard to avoid any camera time whatsoever.
I think this episode answered my question temporal changes in editing as an incident that “happened” a month and a half ago—Baya turned down a chance to work with a hiphop dance troop and only now did someone ask her about it. So to me, it's clear that each episode of the show is “scripted” around a person (or persons) or a theme (as this week it seems to be “work”).
Katelynn, for the most part, is portrayed much better in this episode than last week, explaining more about the transgendered process she's going through. And Chet was quite likeable (and he pulls off wearing a bowtie for not being an economist), although his taunting of Kayelynn bugged me.
